System and method for role validation in identity management artificial intelligence systems using analysis of network identity graphs

ABSTRACT

Systems and methods for embodiments of a graph based artificial intelligence systems for identity management are disclosed. Embodiments of the identity management systems disclosed herein may utilize a network graph approach to analyzing roles of a distributed networked enterprise computing environment. Specifically, in certain embodiments, an artificial intelligence based identity management systems may utilize role graphs to assess the role structure of a distributed enterprise computing environment.

RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a continuation of, and claims a benefit of priorityunder 35 U.S.C. 120 of, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 17/039,594filed Sep. 30, 2020, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ROLE VALIDATION INIDENTITY MANAGEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS USING ANALYSIS OFNETWORK IDENTITY GRAPHS,” which is a continuation of, and claims abenefit of priority under 35 U.S.C. 120 of, U.S. patent application Ser.No. 16/900,530 filed Jun. 12, 2020, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ROLEVALIDATION IN IDENTITY MANAGEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS USINGANALYSIS OF NETWORK IDENTITY GRAPHS,” issued as U.S. Pat. No.10,862,928, which are hereby incorporated herein for all purposes.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material towhich a claim for copyright is made. The copyright owner has noobjection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent documentor the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and TrademarkOffice patent file or records, but reserves all other copyright rightswhatsoever.

TECHNICAL FIELD

This disclosure relates generally to computer security. In particular,this disclosure relates to the application of artificial intelligence toidentity management in a distributed and networked computingenvironment. Even more specifically, this disclosure relates toenhancing computer security in a distributed networked computingenvironment through the use of role validation in these artificialintelligence based identity management systems, including the use ofgraph based analysis of roles and their associated entitlements oridentities in association with such role validation.

BACKGROUND

Acts of fraud, data tampering, privacy breaches, theft of intellectualproperty, and exposure of trade secrets have become front page news intoday's business world. The security access risk posed byinsiders—persons who are granted access to information assets—is growingin magnitude, with the power to damage brand reputation, lower profits,and erode market capitalization.

Identity Management (IM), also known as Identity and Access Management(IAM) or Identity Governance (IG), is, the field of computer securityconcerned with the enablement and enforcement of policies and measureswhich allow and ensure that the right individuals access the rightresources at the right times and for the right reasons. It addresses theneed to ensure appropriate access to resources across increasinglyheterogeneous technology environments and to meet increasingly rigorouscompliance requirements. Escalating security and privacy concerns aredriving governance, access risk management, and compliance to theforefront of identity management. To effectively meet the requirementsand desires imposed upon enterprises for identity management, theseenterprises may be required to prove that they have strong andconsistent controls over who has access to critical applications anddata. And, in response to regulatory requirements and the growingsecurity access risk, most enterprises have implemented some form ofuser access or identity governance.

Yet many companies still struggle with how to focus compliance effortsto address actual risk in what usually is a complex, distributednetworked computing environment. Decisions about which accessentitlements are desirable to grant a particular user are typicallybased on the roles that the user plays within the organization. In largeorganizations, granting and maintaining user access entitlements is adifficult and complex process, involving decisions regarding whether togrant entitlements to thousands of users and hundreds of differentapplications and databases. This complexity can be exacerbated by highemployee turnover, reorganizations, and reconfigurations of the variousaccessible systems and resources.

Organizations that are unable to focus their identity compliance effortson areas of greatest access risk can waste time, labor, and otherresources applying compliance monitoring and controls across the boardto all users and all applications. Furthermore, with no means toestablish a baseline measurement of identity compliance, organizationshave no way to quantify improvements over time and demonstrate thattheir identity controls are working and effectively reducing accessrisk.

Information Technology (IT) personnel of large organizations often feelthat their greatest security risks stemmed from “insider threats,” asopposed to external attacks. The access risks posed by insiders rangefrom careless negligence to more serious cases of financial fraud,corporate espionage, or malicious sabotage of systems and data.Organizations that fail to proactively manage user access can faceregulatory fines, litigation penalties, public relations fees, loss ofcustomer trust, and ultimately lost revenue and lower stock valuation.To minimize the security risk posed by insiders (and outsiders),business entities and institutions alike often establish access or othergovernance policies that eliminate or at least reduce such access risksand implement proactive oversight and management of user accessentitlements to ensure compliance with defined policies and other goodpractices.

One of the main goals of identity management, then, is to help usersidentify and mitigate risks associated with access management. Manytimes this access risk may result as an outgrowth of the evolution ofroles within an enterprise over time. As roles have entitlements addedor deleted and as different roles are assigned or removed from differentidentities these changes may create a complex system that evolves inunpredictable ways over time. As the roles and identities evolve, theymay stray in substantial and detrimental ways from the ‘gold standard’of the role definition or other identity governance desires of theenterprise. While some enterprises manage to iteratively engineer orre-design or re-define their role structures and access model to keeppace with security requirements, the majority of enterprises are unawareof the efficacy of their access security due to the lack of abilities tomonitor and evaluate efficacy of overall access landscape, especially inthe context of roles defined for, or utilized by, the enterprise.

Accordingly, it is desirable for identity management solutions to offertools to assist in the assessment of roles or other identity managementartifacts associated with the identity management data associated withenterprise.

SUMMARY

As mentioned, it is desirable for identity management solutions to offerrole assessment capabilities whereby roles comprising collections ofentitlements may be ascertained from the identity management dataassociated with enterprise and an assessment metric (also refer to as ascore) for a set of these roles may be determined, where the metric is areflection, for example, of the quality or health of the structure ofthe set of roles. Specifically, in many instances, in the context of anenterprise there may be what are referred to as multi-dimensional roles.A multi-dimensional role may be instances of similar roles that may varyslightly according to some criteria. For example, if an enterprise hasmany different locations, a role in one location (e.g., a softwaredeveloper role in Austin, Tex.) may be very similar to a role in anotherlocation (a role for a software developer in San Jose, Calif.). In otherwords, a software developer in either location may require access to asubstantially similar set of entitlements, however, since the creatorsof such roles (which may be, for example, in those two differentlocations) may have no visibility or access into the roles structure ofthe enterprise generally, two (or more) different roles may be created,despite the fact that these roles may be substantially similar (e.g.,comprise similar entitlements) or, in certain cases, may even be thesame. Thus, administrators or others concerned with identify governancewithin an enterprise, or compliance of an enterprise with identitymanagement goals or requirements, may desire to validate or otherwiseassess the role structure of an enterprise (or portions thereof) todetermine the quality or health of these roles. By assessing the healthof the roles structure, such metrics may be useful for compliancepurposes or to assist in optimizing the role structure or more generallystreamlining role management for the enterprise.

What is desired, therefore, are effective system and methods forproviding a holistic view and assessment of the overall access modelhealth across an enterprise, and specifically for assessing the healthof role structures within an enterprise.

By identifying roles that may be strongly similar or otherwise closelyaligned, efficiencies with respect to management of these roles may beachieved. For example, in some cases, roles that have similar sets ofentitlements may be consolidated (e.g., merged) or some of the roleseliminated. As another alternative, roles that share a similar group ofidentities (e.g., where the same set of identities share a set of roles)may be bundled together and an overarching role (referred to as aportfolio role) may be defined such that the bundle of similar roles maybe manage as a group using the portfolio role. Thus, using embodiments,the actual scope of identities (e.g., a user population) for which rolescan be consolidated to reduce use of resources in role management forthat specific population and defining or assigning roles for thatpopulation. More generally, then, by reducing the number of roles or theinteractions with these roles, the number of both computing resourcesand man hours required for such identity governance may be reduced,along with the commensurate cost to the enterprise of such identitymanagement.

To those ends, among others, attention is now directed to theembodiments of artificial intelligence based identity governance systemsthat provide such role assessment. Accordingly, to ameliorate or addressthese issues, among other ends, embodiments of the identity managementsystems disclosed herein may utilize a network graph approach to improveidentity governance, including the assessment of roles associated withthe identity management data of an enterprise. Specifically, embodimentsof identity management systems as disclosed may provide role assessmentbased on a network graph that includes roles of an enterprise.Embodiments may thus generate a network identity graph that includesnodes for identities, entitlements, roles or other identity managementartifacts of an enterprise. Such a network identity graph may be, or mayinclude, a role graph having nodes representing roles associated withthe enterprise and edges representing similarities between the roles(e.g., represented by the nodes). These edges may comprise a similarityweight determined, based on, for example, shared entitlements betweenthe roles or by concurrent identities (e.g., a number of identities thatshare those roles).

In one embodiment, for example, the role graph may be an access rolegraph that is a role graph modeled in terms of entitlement (e.g.,access) similarities between all the roles. The edges of the access rolegraph represent an access similarity relationship between two roles(e.g., nodes representing the roles) joined by the edge of the graph. Aweight may be computed for the access similarity relationship based onthe entitlements shared between the two roles and the number ofentitlements the roles include. Roles with similar entitlements oraccess patterns may thus cluster close together on the access graph.Embodiments of these access role graphs may give high-level ofabstractions on the overall access model of an enterprise whileaccurately reflecting the global role (access) structure. As such, theseaccess role graphs may be useful, for example, as a role provisioning QA(Quality Assessment) tool indicating overall well-being of anenterprises role structure, in recommending consolidation of redundantroles, or verifying how new roles may fit in the current access model.

As another embodiment, for example, the role graph may be a concurrencyrole graph (also referred to as a concurrency or concurrent graph) thatis modeled in terms of concurrent identities shared between roles. Theedges of the concurrency graph represent an concurrency similarityrelationship between two roles (e.g., nodes representing the roles)joined by the edge of the graph. A weight may be computed for theconcurrency similarity relationship based on the number of identitieswhich share those roles and the number of identities that have thoseroles. Roles with high concurrency with one another cluster closertogether on the concurrency graph. Moreover, the concurrency graph maybe filtered based on the number of supporting identities (e.g., thenumber of identities that include both roles). This support thusdetermines the significance of the computed concurrency weights, byallowing the concurrency graph to filtered to filter out highlyconcurrent roles that share only few identities, thus rendering moremeaningful representation of the concurrency graph. As such, theseconcurrency graphs may be useful as a “role-profiling assistant”identifying concurrent patterns of peer access, simplifying businessrules, or surfacing potential profiles for new joiners. Theseconcurrency graphs may also allow users to dive deeper and profile roleswithin units of an enterprise when applied with scoping of theconcurrency graph.

Moreover, according to embodiments, various metrics may be determinedfor assessing the quality or health of the role structure of anenterprise based on an access role graph or a concurrency role graph.Specifically, optimal (e.g., ideal) network or graph topologies foraccess and concurrency graphs can be inferred. Graph based metrics maythus provide a starting point to standardize quality scoring for rolestructures and access models. In one embodiment, a combination of graphbased metrics may be utilized to measure a role graph structure withrespect to an ideal graph topology optimized for the enterprise. Such ascoring system allows personalization taking into account the trade-offbetween compliance-driven and enablement-driven governance strategies.Thus role data, including for example, visual depictions of role graphsfor the enterprise or quality assessment scores may be presented to auser through embodiments of the identity management systems as depictedherein.

Enterprises (e.g., with existing access governance strategy) could thusutilize a role validation or access awareness interface presented by theidentity management system to evaluate and validate their existing rolestructure to, for example, explore hierarchical relationships betweenexisting roles, profile, re-provision, or label (e.g., tag) highlysimilar existing roles (e.g., similarity 75% or more), consolidate andlabel existing roles that are heavily concurrent within certainpopulations, or evaluate the health of an entire (or portion of a) rolestructure based on the scoring system or visual depiction of a rolegraph.

Similarly, enterprise involved in in active access modeling orgovernance process (e.g., using role mining capabilities) could utilizethe role validation or access awareness interface for decisions relatedto prioritizing roles based on the novelty with respect to existingroles; the provisioning of newly discovered roles with significantlyhigh contrast to existing roles; validating the impact of provisionedroles under a current role structure, merging, profiling, or labeling(tag) highly similar existing roles, or enhancing accessinterpretability and enabling detection of potential risk based onsecurity policies.

Embodiments provide numerous advantages over previously availablesystems and methods for measuring access risk. As embodiments are basedon a graph representation of identity management data, the graphstructure may serve as a physical model of the data, allowing moreintuitive access to the data (e.g., via graph database querying, or viagraph visualization techniques). This ability may yield deeper and morerelevant insights for users of identity management systems. Suchabilities are also an outgrowth of the accuracy of the results producedby embodiments as disclosed.

As such, these embodiments of identity management systems may allow anaccurate approach to role validation in identity governance. This willallow the identification and assessment of the role structure of anenterprise roles and the evolution of such a role structure. Ultimately,this will yield an improved model for roles that will accurately matchthe evolving access entitlement system.

Moreover, the graph format used by certain embodiments, allows thetranslation of domain and enterprise specific concepts, phenomena, andissues into tangible, quantifiable, and verifiable hypotheses which maybe examined or validated with graph-based algorithms. Accordingly,embodiments may be especially useful in assessing risk and in compliancewith security policies or the like.

Additionally, embodiments as disclosed may offer the technologicalimprovement of reducing the computational burden and memory requirementsof systems implementing these embodiments through the improved datastructures and the graph processing and analysis implemented by suchembodiments. Accordingly, embodiments may improve the performance andresponsiveness of identity management systems that utilize suchembodiments of identity graphs and clustering approaches by reducing thecomputation time and processor cycles required (e.g., and thus improvingprocessing speed) and simultaneously reducing memory usage or othermemory requirements.

These, and other, aspects of the disclosure will be better appreciatedand understood when considered in conjunction with the followingdescription and the accompanying drawings. It should be understood,however, that the following description, while indicating variousembodiments of the disclosure and numerous specific details thereof, isgiven by way of illustration and not of limitation. Many substitutions,modifications, additions and/or rearrangements may be made within thescope of the disclosure without departing from the spirit thereof, andthe disclosure includes all such substitutions, modifications, additionsand/or rearrangements.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE FIGURES

The drawings accompanying and forming part of this specification areincluded to depict certain aspects of the invention. A clearerimpression of the invention, and of the components and operation ofsystems provided with the invention, will become more readily apparentby referring to the exemplary, and therefore nonlimiting, embodimentsillustrated in the drawings, wherein identical reference numeralsdesignate the same components. Note that the features illustrated in thedrawings are not necessarily drawn to scale.

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a distributed networked computerenvironment including one embodiment of an identity management system.

FIG. 2 is a flow diagram of one embodiment of a method for peer groupdetection and analysis using cluster based analysis of identity graphs.

FIGS. 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D and 3E depict example visual representations ofidentity graphs.

FIGS. 4-7 depict interfaces that may be utilized by embodiments of anidentity management system.

FIG. 8 is a block diagram of a distributed networked computerenvironment including one embodiment of an identity management system.

FIG. 9 is a flow diagram of one embodiment of a method for role mining.

FIGS. 10-14 depict interfaces that may be utilized by embodiments of anidentity management system.

FIG. 15 is a block diagram of a distributed networked computerenvironment including one embodiment of an identity management system.

FIG. 16 depict example visual representations of role graphs.

FIG. 17 depicts an example representation of a role graph.

FIG. 18 is a flow diagram of one embodiment of a method for roleassessment.

FIGS. 19A, 19B, 19C and 19D depict interfaces that may be utilized byembodiments of an identity management system.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

The invention and the various features and advantageous details thereofare explained more fully with reference to the non-limiting embodimentsthat are illustrated in the accompanying drawings and detailed in thefollowing description. Descriptions of well-known starting materials,processing techniques, components and equipment are omitted so as not tounnecessarily obscure the invention in detail. It should be understood,however, that the detailed description and the specific examples, whileindicating some embodiments of the invention, are given by way ofillustration only and not by way of limitation. Various substitutions,modifications, additions and/or rearrangements within the spirit and/orscope of the underlying inventive concept will become apparent to thoseskilled in the art from this disclosure.

Before delving into more details regarding the specific embodimentsdisclosed herein, some context may be helpful. In response to regulatoryrequirements and security access risks and concerns, most enterpriseshave implemented some form of computer security or access controls. Toassist in implementing security measures and access controls in anenterprise environment, many of these enterprises have implementedIdentity Management in association with their distributed networkedcomputer environments. Identity Management solutions allow thedefinition of a function or an entity associated with an enterprise. Anidentity may thus represent almost physical or virtual entity, place,person or other item that an enterprise would like to define. Identitiescan therefore represent, for example, functions or capacities (e.g.,manager, engineer, team leader, etc.), title (e.g., Chief TechnologyOfficer), groups (development, testing, accounting, etc.), processes(e.g., nightly back-up process), physical locations (e.g., cafeteria,conference room), individual users or humans (e.g., John Locke) oralmost any other physical or virtual entity, place, person or otheritem. Each of these identities may therefore be assigned zero or moreentitlements with respect to the distributed networked computerenvironments. An entitlement may be the ability to perform or access afunction within the distributed networked computer environments,including, for example, accessing computing systems, applications, filesystems, particular data or data items, networks, subnetworks or networklocations, etc.

To facilitate the assignment of these entitlements, enterprises may alsobe provided with the ability to define roles within the context of theirIdentity Management solution. A role within the context of IdentityManagement may be a collection of entitlements. These roles may beassigned a name or identifiers (e.g., manager, engineer, team leader) byan enterprise that designate the type of user or identity that should beassigned such a role. By assigning a role to an identity in the IdentityManagement context, the identity may be assigned the correspondingcollection of entitlements associated with the assigned role.Accordingly, by defining these roles enterprises may define a “goldstandard” of what they desire their identity governance to look like.

Thus, by managing the roles within the enterprise computing environment,the assignment of entitlements and the proliferation of these roles orentitlements may be controlled. However, escalating security and privacyconcerns are driving governance, access risk management, and complianceto the forefront of Identity Management. Yet many companies stillstruggle with how to focus compliance efforts to address actual risk inwhat usually is a complex, distributed networked computing environment.Decisions about which access roles or entitlements are desirable togrant a particular user are typically based on the business roles thatthe user plays within the organization. In large organizations, grantingand maintaining roles and user access entitlements is a difficult andcomplex process, involving decisions regarding whether to grant roles orentitlements to thousands of users and hundreds of differentapplications and databases. This complexity can be exacerbated by highemployee turnover, reorganizations, and reconfigurations of the variousaccessible systems and resources.

However, to effectively meet the requirements and desires imposed uponenterprises for Identity Management, these enterprises may be requiredto prove that they have strong and consistent controls over who hasaccess to critical applications and data. Generally then, what isdesired are effective system and methods for providing a holistic viewand assessment of the overall access model health across an enterprise,and specifically for assessing the health of role structures within anenterprise. More specifically, it is desirable for identity managementsolutions to offer role assessment capability whereby roles may beascertained from the identity management data associated with enterpriseand the structure of these roles assessed or presented to a user.Additionally, it may be desirable to present an assessment metric forthese roles, where the metric is a reflection, for example, of thequality or health of the structure of the set of roles.

To those ends, among others, attention is now directed to theembodiments of artificial intelligence based identity governance systemsthat provide such role assessment. Specifically, embodiments of theidentity management systems disclosed herein may utilize a network graphapproach to improve identity governance, including the assessment ofroles associated with the identity management data of an enterprise. Inparticular, embodiments of identity management systems as disclosed mayprovide role assessment based on a network graph that includes roles ofan enterprise. Embodiments may thus generate a network identity graphthat includes nodes for identities, entitlements, roles or otheridentity management artifacts of an enterprise. Such a network identitygraph may be, or may include, a role graph having nodes representingroles associated with the enterprise and edges representing similaritiesbetween the roles (e.g., represented by the nodes). These edges maycomprise a similarity weight determined, based on, for example, sharedentitlements between the roles or by concurrent identities (e.g., anumber of identities that share those roles).

In one embodiment, for example, the role graph may be an access rolegraph that is a role graph modeled in terms of entitlement (e.g.,access) similarities between all the roles. A weight may be computed forthe access similarity relationship based on the entitlements sharedbetween the two roles and the number of entitlements the roles include.Embodiments of these access role graphs may give high-level ofabstractions on the overall access model of an enterprise whileaccurately reflecting the global role (access) structure. As such, theseaccess role graphs may be useful, for example, as a role provisioning QA(Quality Assessment) tool indicating overall well-being of anenterprise's role structure, in recommending consolidation of redundantroles, or verifying how new roles may fit in the current access model.

As another embodiment, for example, the role graph may be a concurrencyrole graph (also referred to as a concurrency or concurrent graph) thatis modeled in terms of concurrent identities shared between roles. Aweight may be computed for the concurrency similarity relationship basedon the number of identities which share those roles and the number ofidentities that have those roles. These concurrency graphs may be usefulas a “role-profiling assistant” identifying concurrent patterns of peeraccess, simplifying business rules, or surfacing potential profiles fornew joiners. These concurrency graphs may also allow users to divedeeper and profile roles within units of an enterprise when applied withscoping of the concurrency graph.

Moreover, according to embodiments, various metrics may be determinedfor assessing the quality or health of the role structure of anenterprise based on an access role graph or a concurrency role graph.Specifically, optimal (e.g., ideal) network or graph topologies foraccess and concurrency graphs can be inferred. Graph based metrics maythus provide a starting point to standardize quality scoring for rolestructures and access models. In one embodiment, a combination of graphbased metrics may be utilized to measure a role graph structure withrespect to an ideal graph topology optimized for the enterprise. Such ascoring system allows personalization taking into account the trade-offbetween compliance-driven and enablement-driven governance strategies.Thus role data, including for example, visual depictions of role graphsfor the enterprise or quality assessment scores may be presented to auser through embodiments of the identity management systems as depictedherein.

Embodiments as disclosed herein may thus provide role assessment from anenterprise's actual identity management data. By determining a currentsnapshot of the roles mined from an actual state of the enterprise'sidentity governance structure, the enterprise roles as defined by theusers of the enterprise may be compared with a desired state of theroles to reduce discrepancies therebetween, including for example, theidentification of new roles, the evolution of the enterprise definedroles to match the evaluation of the actual role structure (e.g., theassessed roles), or the performance housekeeping on the assignment ofentitlements or roles within the enterprise to more particularly tailorthe actual role structure to an ideal role structure.

In certain cases, the efficacy of embodiments of role assessment in anidentity management system may depend at least partially on the state ofthe identities, entitlements or roles within a distributed computingenterprise. Accordingly, before embodiments of the role assessment arediscussed in more detail, it may be useful to an understanding ofcertain embodiments if the analysis and use of roles, entitlements andidentities of an enterprise by embodiments of artificial intelligenceidentity governance systems are discussed in more detail, as such datamay be used in the role assessment itself.

With that in mind, it may be understood that good governance practice inthe identity space relies on the ‘social’ principle that identities withstrongly similar attributes should be assigned similar, if notidentical, access entitlements. In the realm of identity governance andadministration, this approach allows for a separation of duties and thusmakes it feasible to identify, evaluate, and prioritize risks associatedwith privileged access. As part of a robust identity management system,it is therefore highly desirable to analyze an enterprise's data toidentify potential risks. In principle, strictly enforced pre-existinggovernance policies should ensure that identities with strongly similaraccess privileges are strongly similar. It would thus be desirable togroup or cluster the identities of an enterprise into peer groups suchthat the identities in a peer group are similar with respect to the setof entitlements assigned to the identities of that group (e.g., relativeto other identities or other groups). Peer grouping of the identitieswithin an enterprise (or viewing the peer groups of identities) mayallow, for example, an auditor or other person performing a complianceanalysis or evaluation to quantitatively and qualitatively assess theeffectiveness of any applicable pre-existing polices, or lack thereof,and how strictly they are enforced.

However, the data utilized by most identity management systems is notstrictly numerical data. Often this data includes identifications ofidentities (e.g., alphanumeric identifiers for an identity as maintainedby an identity management system) and identifications of entitlements orroles associated with those identities (e.g., alphanumeric identifiersfor entitlements or roles as maintained by the identity managementsystem). This data may also include data identifying roles (e.g.,alphanumeric identifiers or labels for a role as maintained by anidentity management solution) and identifications of entitlementsassociated with those roles (e.g., alphanumeric identifiers for thecollection of entitlements associated with those roles). Clustering ofthis type of categorical data (e.g., for peer grouping of identities) istypically a harder task than clustering data of numerical type. Inparticular, clustering categorical data is particularly challengingsince intuitive, geometric-based, distance measures experienced in reallife, e.g., Euclidean distance, by definition, are exclusive tonumerical data. A distance measure is a crucial component of anyclustering algorithm as it is utilized at the lowest level to determinehow similar/dissimilar two data points are.

For example, the one-hot-encoding data transform, which can convertcategorical data into numerical data, does not work in these types ofcases. Due to large number of entitlements, when combining thenumerical, high-dimensional, one-hot encoded data with traditionalgeometric distances (e.g., Euclidean), distances between data pointswill be quite large and will make it hard, if not impossible, for aclustering algorithm to yield meaningful outputs. This is a directmathematical outcome to the high dimensionality of the ambient space. Itis a well-documented issue in data science literature, and theapplicable nomenclature is “curse of dimensionality”. Typicaldimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., PCA, t-SNE, etc.) have beenexperimented with, but due to the way these clustering algorithmsmanipulate numerical data, the resulting transforms may manipulate theoriginal data in ways that are not interpretable, hence not useful inthis context.

Accordingly, conventional statistical clustering such as K-modes, orK-modes used in association with a data-mining, pattern-findingalgorithm such as Equivalence Class Transformation (ECLAT), have thusproven inadequate. Many of the reasons for the inadequacy of suchtypical clustering approaches have to do with the computationallyintensive nature of the computer implementations of such clustering,which are both computationally and memory intensive, reducing orhindering the performance and responsiveness of identity managementsystems that utilize such clustering approaches.

Attempts to remedy these problems by altering the clustering to discardor ignore less popular identities or entitlements to enhance thesignal-to-noise ratio in their application have been less thansuccessful, achieving neither adequate results in the clustersdetermined or in improving the performance or memory usage of systemswhich employ such clustering. Other workarounds for these deficiencieshave also proven unworkable to this type of identity and entitlementdata.

Moreover, when attempting to cluster based on categorical data, typicalclustering algorithms do not capture the social aspects of identitygovernance. Homophily in social networks, as defined in social sciences,is the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similarothers. In identity governance, homophily in the identity space usuallyresults as a consequence of enforcing the governance principle thatsimilar identities should be assigned similar access entitlements. It isthus important to attempt to capture, or otherwise utilize thishomophily, when peer grouping for identity management. As a consequenceof all these deficiencies, the results from prior approach to identityclustering in the context of identity management were harder tointerpret, yielding fewer insights, and negatively impacting theperformance, efficiency, and overall quality of identity managementsystems. The data-driven clustering approach of identities into peergroups remains, however, a crucial component of identity management in adistributed and networked computing environment for a variety ofreasons, including the usefulness of reviewing and visualizing suchclusters of identities for auditing and compliance purposes.

Accordingly, to ameliorate these issues, among other ends, embodimentsof the identity management systems disclosed herein may utilize anetwork graph approach to peer grouping of identities and entitlementsof distributed networked enterprise computing environment. Specifically,in certain embodiments, data on the identities and the respectiveentitlements assigned to each identity as utilized in an enterprisecomputer environment may be obtained by an identity management system.Using the identity and entitlement data, then, a network identity graphmay be constructed, where the nodes of the graph correspond to, andrepresent, each of the identities or entitlements. Each edge (orrelationship) of the graph may join two nodes of the graph and beassociated with a similarity weight representing a degree of similaritybetween the identities or entitlements of the respective nodes. Theidentity graph may then be pruned to remove weak edges (e.g., thoseedges whose similarity weight may fall below a pruning threshold). Thepruned identity graph can then be clustered into peer groups ofidentities or entitlement groups (e.g., using a graph based communitydetection algorithm). These peer groups of identities (or entitlements)can then be stored (e.g., separately or in the identity graph) and usedby the identity management system. For example, a visual representationof the graph may be presented to a user of the identity management toassist in compliance or certification assessments or evaluation of theidentities and entitlements as currently used by the enterprise.

In certain embodiments, the clustering of identities or entitlements maybe optimized based on a peer group assessment metric, such as, forexample, graph modularity determined based on the identity graph or thedetermined peer groups. For instance, in one embodiment, if a peer groupassessment metric is below (or above) a quality threshold a feedbackloop may be instituted whereby the pruning threshold is adjusted by someamount (up or down) and the originally determined identity graph ispruned based on the adjusted pruning threshold (or the previously prunedidentity graph may be further pruned). This newly pruned identity graphcan then be clustered into new peer groups of identities or entitlementsand a peer group assessment metric determined based on the newly prunedidentity graph or the newly determined peer groups. If this new peerassessment metric is now above (or below) the quality threshold thefeedback loop may stop and these peer groups of identities orentitlements can then be stored (e.g., separately or in the identitygraph) and used by the identity management system.

Otherwise, the feedback loop may continue by again adjusting the pruningthreshold further (e.g., further up or further down relative to theprevious iteration of the feedback loop), re-pruning the identity graphbased on the adjusted pruning threshold, clustering this newly prunedgraph, determining another peer group assessment metric and comparingthis metric to the quality threshold. In this manner, the feedback loopof adjustment of the pruning threshold, re-pruning the graph,re-clustering the identity graph into peer groups may be repeated untilthe peer group assessment metric reaches a desired threshold. Moreover,by tailoring the peer group assessment metric and quality threshold toinclude or reflect domain or enterprise specific criteria, theclustering results (e.g., the peer groups of identities or entitlementsresulting from the clustering) may more accurately reflect particularrequirements or the needs of a particular enterprise or be bettertailored to a particular use.

Embodiments may thus provide a number of advantages including allowingmore intuitive access to the data (e.g., via graph database querying, orvia graph visualization techniques), which may, in turn, yield deeperand more relevant insights for users of identity management systems.Moreover, embodiments as disclosed may offer the technologicalimprovement of reducing the computational burden and memory requirementsof systems implementing these embodiments through the improved datastructures and the graph processing and analysis implemented by suchembodiments. Accordingly, embodiments may improve the performance andresponsiveness of identity management systems that utilize suchembodiments. Likewise, embodiments may be dynamic with respect to time,allowing the development update processes using deltas between snapshotsof data collection, bringing down operational costs and improving theperformance and robustness of embodiments. Moreover, the graph formatused by certain embodiments, allows the translation of domain andenterprise specific concepts, phenomena, and issues into tangible,quantifiable, and verifiable hypotheses which may be examine or validatewith graph based algorithms. Accordingly, embodiments may be especiallyuseful in assessing risk and in compliance with security policies or thelike.

Turning first to FIG. 1 , then, a distributed networked computerenvironment including one embodiment of an identity management system isdepicted. Here, the networked computer environment may include anenterprise computing environment 100. Enterprise environment 100includes a number of computing devices or applications that may becoupled over a computer network 102 or combination of computer networks,such as the Internet, an intranet, an internet, a Wide Area Network(WAN), a Local Area Network (LAN), a cellular network, a wireless orwired network, or another type of network. Enterprise environment 100may thus include a number of resources, various resource groups andusers associated with an enterprise (for purposes of this disclosure anyfor profit or non-profit entity or organization). Users may have variousroles, job functions, responsibilities, etc. to perform within variousprocesses or tasks associated with enterprise environment 100. Users caninclude employees, supervisors, managers, IT personnel, vendors,suppliers, customers, robotic or application based users, etc.associated with enterprise 100.

Users may access resources of the enterprise environment 100 to performfunctions associated with their jobs, obtain information aboutenterprise 100 and its products, services, and resources, enter ormanipulate information regarding the same, monitor activity inenterprise 100, order supplies and services for enterprise 100, manageinventory, generate financial analyses and reports, or generally toperform any task, activity or process related to the enterprise 100.Thus, to accomplish their responsibilities, users may have entitlementsto access resources of the enterprise environment 100. Theseentitlements may give rise to risk of negligent or malicious use ofresources.

Specifically, to accomplish different functions, different users mayhave differing access entitlements to differing resources. Some accessentitlements may allow particular users to obtain, enter, manipulate,etc. information in resources which may be relatively innocuous. Someaccess entitlements may allow particular users to manipulate informationin resources of the enterprise 100 which might be relatively sensitive.Some sensitive information can include human resource files, financialrecords, marketing plans, intellectual property files, etc. Access tosensitive information can allow negligent or malicious activities toharm the enterprise itself. Access risks can thus result from a userhaving entitlements with which the user can access resources that theparticular user should not have access to; or for other reasons. Accessrisks can also arise from roles in enterprise environment 100 which mayshift, change, evolve, etc. leaving entitlements non optimallydistributed among various users.

To assist in managing the entitlements assigned to various users andmore generally in managing and assessing access risks in enterpriseenvironment 100, an identity management system 150 may be employed. Suchan identity management system 150 may allow an administrative or othertype of user to define one or more identities, one or more entitlements,or one or more roles, and associate defined identities with entitlementsusing, for example, an administrator interface 152. The assignment mayoccur, for example, by directly assigning an entitlement to an identity,or by assigning a role to an identity whereby the collection ofentitlements comprising the role are thus associated with the identity.Examples of such identity management systems are Sailpoint's IdentityIQand IdentityNow products. Note here, that while the identity managementsystem 150 has been depicted in the diagram as separate and distinctfrom the enterprise environment 100 and coupled to enterpriseenvironment 100 over a computer network 104 (which may the same as, ordifferent than, network 102), it will be realized that such an identitymanagement system 150 may be deployed as part of the enterpriseenvironment 100, remotely from the enterprise environment, as a cloudbased application or set of services, or in another configuration.

An identity may thus be almost physical or virtual thing, place, personor other item that an enterprise would like to define. For example, anidentity may be a capacity, groups, processes, physical locations,individual users or humans or almost any other physical or virtualentity, place, person or other item. An entitlement may be an item(e.g., token) that upon granting to a user will allow the user toacquire a certain account or privileged access level that enables theuser to perform a certain function within the distributed networkedenterprise computer environment 100. Thought of another way, anentitlement may be a specific permission granted within a computersystem, such as access to a particular building (based on a user's keybadge), access to files and folders, or access to certain parts ofwebsites. Entitlements may also define the actions a user can takeagainst the items they have access to, including, for example, accessingcomputing systems, applications, file systems, particular data or dataitems, networks, subnetworks or network locations, etc. Each of theseidentities may therefore be assigned zero or more entitlements withrespect to the distributed networked computer environments.

To facilitate the assignment of these entitlements, enterprises may alsobe provided with the ability to define roles through the identitymanagement system 150. A role within the context of the identitymanagement system 150 may be a collection of entitlements. These rolesmay be assigned a name or identifiers (e.g., manager, engineer level 2,team leader) by an enterprise that designate the type of user oridentity that should be assigned such a role. By assigning a role to anidentity using the identity management system 150, the identity may beassigned the corresponding collection of entitlements associated withthe assigned role.

The identity management system 150 may thus store identity managementdata 154. The identity management data 154 stored may include a set ofentries, each entry corresponding to and including an identity (e.g.,alphanumerical identifiers for identities) as defined and managed by theidentity management system, a list or vector of entitlements or rolesassigned to that identity by the identity management system, and a timestamp at which the identity management data was collected from theidentity management system. Other data could also be associated witheach identity, including data that may be provided from other systemssuch as a title, location or department associated with the identity.The set of entries may also include entries corresponding to roles,where each entry for a role may include the role identifier (e.g.,alphanumerical identifier or name for the role) and a list or vector ofthe entitlements associated with each role. Other data could also beassociated with each role, such as a title, location or departmentassociated with the role.

Collectors 156 of the identity management system 150 may thus request orotherwise obtain data from various touchpoint systems within enterpriseenvironment 100. These touchpoint systems may include, for exampleActive Directory systems, Java Database Connectors within the enterprise100, Microsoft SQL servers, Azure Active Directory servers, OpenLDAPservers, Oracle Databases, SalesForce applications, ServiceNowapplications, SAP applications or Google GSuite.

Accordingly, the collectors 156 of the identity management system 150may obtain or collect event data from various systems within theenterprise environment 100 and process the event data to associate theevent data with the identities defined in the identity management data154 to evaluate or analyze these events or other data in an identitymanagement context. A user may interact with the identity managementsystem 150 through a user interface 158 to access or manipulate data onidentities, roles, entitlements, events or generally preform identitymanagement with respect to enterprise environment 100.

As part of a robust identity management system, it is desirable toanalyze the identity management data 154 associated with an enterprise100. Specifically, it is desirable to group or cluster the identities orentitlements of an enterprise 100 into peer groups such that, forexample, the identities in a peer group are similar with respect to theset of entitlements assigned to the identities of that group (e.g.,relative to other identities or other groups) or, to determine peergroups of entitlements such that entitlement patterns and assignment maybe determined and role mining performed.

Peer grouping of the identities within an enterprise (or viewing thepeer groups of identities) may allow, for example, an auditor otherperson performing a compliance analysis or evaluation to quantitativelyand qualitatively assess the effectiveness of any applicablepre-existing polices, or lack thereof, and how strictly they areenforced. Similarly, peer grouping of entitlements may allow roles to bedetermined from such entitlement groups and outlier entitlements to beidentified. This information may, in turn, be utilized to redefine orgovern existing roles as defined in the identity management system 150and allow users of the identity management system 150 greater visibilityinto the roles of the enterprise 100.

Accordingly, an identity management system 160 may include a harvester162 and a graph generator 164. The harvester 162 may obtain identitymanagement data from one or more identity management systems 150associated with enterprise 100. The identity management data may beobtained, for example, as part of a regular collection or harvestingprocess performed at some regular interval by connecting to, andrequesting the identity management data from, the identity managementsystem 150. The identity management data stored may thus include a setof entries, each entry corresponding to and including an identity asdefined and managed by the identity management system, a list or vectorof entitlements or roles assigned to that identity by the identitymanagement system, and a time stamp at which the identity managementdata was collected from the identity management system 150. The identitymanagement data may also include a set of entries for roles, each entrycorresponding to and including a role as defined and managed by theidentity management system 150 and a list or vector of entitlementsassigned to that role by the identity management system 150, and a timestamp at which that identity management data was collected from theidentity management system 150.

Graph generator 164 may generate a peer grouped identity graph from theobtained identity management data. Specifically, in one embodiment, aproperty (identity) graph may be generated from the identity managementdata obtained from the enterprise. Each of the identities andentitlements from the most recently obtained identity management datamay be determined and a node of the graph created for each identity andentitlement. An edge is constructed between every pair of nodes (e.g.,identities) that shares at least one entitlement and between every pairof nodes (e.g., entitlements) that shares at least one identity. Eachedge of the graph may also be associated with a similarity weightrepresenting a degree of similarity between the identities of therespective nodes joined by that edge, or between the entitlements of therespective nodes joined by that edge. It will be noted here that while asimilarity weight may be utilized on edges between both identity nodesand entitlement nodes, the similarity weight type, determination andvalue may be determined differently based upon the respective type ofnode(s) being joined that weighted edge. Accordingly, the obtainedidentity management data may be represented by an identity graph (e.g.,per enterprise) and stored in graph data store 166.

Once the identity graph is generated by the graph generator 164, thegraph may then be pruned to remove edges based on their weighting.Again, the pruning of edges between identity nodes and entitlementsnodes may be accomplished in the same, or a different manner. Forexample, a pruning threshold utilized to prune edges between identitynodes may be different than a pruning threshold utilized to prune edgesbetween entitlement nodes as well as across customers.

The pruned identity graph can then be used to cluster the identitiesinto peer groups of identities or to cluster the entitlements into peergroups of entitlements. This clustering may be accomplished, forexample, a community-detection algorithm. This clustering result mayalso be optimized by the graph generator 164 through the use of afeedback loop to optimize the pruning of the edges until a desiredmetric for assessing the quality of the peer groups generated exceeds adesired threshold or satisfies certain (e.g., optimization or other)criteria. It will be noted here as well, that while the peer grouping ofboth identities or entitlements may be determined in embodiments, thepeer grouping may be accomplished in the same or different manners foridentities and entitlements in different embodiments. For example, thecommunity detection, optimization, feedback loop or quality assessmentmetric may all be the same or different when clustering the identity orentitlements of the entitlement graph. It will also be noted here, thatwhile identities and entitlements are discussed herein as examples ofidentity management artifacts that are represented as nodes in thegraph, as discussed above, other identity management artifacts (e.g.,roles, groups, etc.) may also be represented as nodes in the identitygraph, and may be similar clustered or grouped into peer groups.

More generally, then, the pruning and clustering of the identity nodesof the identity graph may be performed separately from the pruning andclustering of the entitlement nodes of the identity graph. Accordingly,the property graph may comprise at least two subgraphs, the identitiessubgraph comprising at least the identity nodes and edges between theseidentity nodes and the entitlement subgraph comprising at least theentitlement nodes and edges between those entitlement nodes. Once thepeer groups of identities or entitlements are determined, the peergroups can then be stored (e.g., separately or in the property graphitself) and used by the identity management system 160. For example,each peer group of identities (also referred to herein as an identitygroup) may be assigned a peer group identifier and the peer groupidentifier associated with each identity assigned to the peer group bystoring the peer group identifier in association with the node in thegraph representing that identity. Similarly, each peer group ofentitlements (e.g., also referred to herein as an entitlement group) maybe assigned a peer group identifier and the peer group identifierassociated with each entitlement assigned to the peer group by storingthe peer group identifier in association with the node in the graphrepresenting that entitlement.

An interface 168 of the identity management system 160 may use theidentity graph in the graph data store 166 or associated peer groups topresent one or more interface which may be used for risk assessment, aswill be discussed. For example, an interface 168 may present a visualrepresentation of the graph, the identities, entitlements, or the peergroups in the identity graph to a user of the identity management system160 associated with enterprise 100 to assist in compliance orcertification assessments or evaluation of the identities, entitlementsor roles as currently used by the enterprise (e.g., as represented inidentity management data 154 of identity management system 150).

Before moving on, it will be noted here that while identity managementsystem 160 and identity management system 150 have been depictedseparately for purposes of explanation and illustration, it will beapparent that the functionality of identity management systems 150, 160may be combined into a single or a plurality of identity managementsystem as is desired for a particular embodiment and the depiction andseparation of the identity management systems and their respectivefunctionality has been depicted separately solely for purposes of easeof depiction and description.

Turning now to FIG. 2 , a flow diagram for one embodiment of a methodfor determining peer groups of identities using a graph database isdepicted. Embodiments of such a method may be employed by graphgenerators of identity management systems to generate identity graphsand associated peer groups from identity management data, as discussedabove. It will be noted here, that while this embodiment is described inassociation with the determination of peer groups of identities in theidentity graph, similar embodiments may be applied to entitlement nodesand associated similarity relationships of an identity graph todetermine peer groups of entitlements in such an identity graph.

Initially, at step 210, identity management data may be obtained. Asdiscussed, in one embodiment, this identity management data may beobtained from one or more identity management systems that are deployedin association with an enterprise's distributed computing environment.Thus, the identity management data may be obtained, for example, as partof a regular collection or harvesting process performed at some regularinterval by connecting to, requesting the identity management data from,an identity management system. The identity management data may also beobtained on a one-time or user initiated basis.

As will be understood, the gathering of identity management data anddetermination of peer groups can be implemented on a regular,semi-regular or repeated basis, and thus may be implemented dynamicallyin time. Accordingly, as the data is obtained, it may be stored as atime-stamped snapshot. The identity management data stored may thusinclude a set of entries, each entry corresponding to and including anidentity (e.g., alphanumerical identifiers for identities) as definedand managed by the identity management system, a list or vector ofentitlements assigned to that identity by the identity managementsystem, and a time stamp at which the identity management data wascollected from the identity management system. Other data could also beassociated with each identity, including data that may be provided froman identity management system such as a title, location or departmentassociated with the identity. The collection of entries or identitiesassociated with the same times stamp can thus be thought of as asnapshot from that time of the identities and entitlements of theenterprise computing environment as management by the identitymanagement system.

As an example of identity management data that may be obtained from anidentity management system, the following is one example of a JavascriptObject Notation (JSON) object that may relate to an identity:

{  “attributes”: {   “Department”: “Finance”,   “costcenter”: “[R01e,L03]”,   “displayName”: “Catherine Simmons”,   “email”:“Catherine.Simmons@demoexample.com”,   “empId”: “1b2c3d”,   “firstname”:“Catherine”,   “inactive”: “false”,   “jobtitle”: “Treasury Analyst”,  “lastname”: “Simmons”,   “location”: “London”,   “manager”:“Amanda.Ross”,   “region”: “Europe”,   “riskScore”: 528,   “startDate”:“12/31/2016 00:00:00AM UTC”,   “nativeIdentity_source_2”: “source_2”,  “awesome_attribute_source_1”: “source_1”,   “twin_attribute_a” : “twina”,   “twin_attribute_b” : “twin b”,   “twin_attribute_c” : “twin c”  }, “id”: “2c9084ee5a8de328015a8de370100082”,  “integration_id”: “iiq”, “customer_id”: “ida-bali”,  “meta”: {   “created”:“2017-03-02T07:19:37.233Z”,   “modified”: “2017-03-02T07:24:12.024Z”  }, “name”: “Catherine.Simmons”,  “refs”: {   “accounts”: {    “id”: [    “2c9084ee5a8de328015a8de370110083”    ],    “type”: “account”   },  “entitlements”: {    “id”: [     “2c9084ee5a8de328015a8de449060e54”,    “2c9084ee5a8de328015a8de449060e55”    ],    “type”: “entitlement”  },   “manager”: {    “id”: [     “2c9084ee5a8de022015a8de0c52b031d”   ],    “type”: “identity”   }  },  “type”: “identity” }

As another example of identity management data that may be obtained froman identity management system, the following is one example of a JSONobject that may relate to an entitlement:

{  “integration_id”: “bd992e37-bbe7-45ae-bbbf-c97a59194cbc”,  “refs”: {  “application”: {    “id”: [     “2c948083616ca13a01616ca1d4aa0301”   ],    “type”: “application”   }  },  “meta”: {   “created”:“2018-02-06T19:40:08.005Z”,   “modified”: “2018-02-06T19:40:08.018Z”  }, “name”: “Domain Administrators”,  “attributes”: {   “description”:“Domain Administrators group on Active Directory”,   “attribute”:“memberOf”,   “aggregated”: true,   “requestable”: true,   “type”:“group”,   “value”: “cn=Domain Administrators,dc=domain,dc=local”  }, “id”: “2c948083616ca13a01616ca1f1c50377”,  “type”: “entitlement”, “customer_id”: “3a60b474-4f43-4523-83d1-eb0fd571828f” }

As another example of identity management data that may be obtained froman identity management system, the following is one example of a JSONobject that may relate to a role:

{ ″id″: ″id″, ″name″: ″name″, ″description″: ″description″, ″modified″:″2018-09- 07T17:49:33.667Z″, ″created″: ″2018-09-07T17:49:33.667Z″,″enabled″: true, ″requestable″: true, “tags”: [ {    “id”:″2c9084ee5a8ad545345345a8de370110083”     “name” : “SOD-SOX”,      “type”: ”TAG”    }, {    “id”:″2c9084ee5a8ad545345345a8de370122093”     “name”: “PrivilegedAccess”,      “type”: ”TAG”    }, ] “accessProfiles”: [  {      “id”:″accessProfileId″,   ″name″: ″accessProfileName″ } ],″accessProfileCount″: 1, ″owner″: { ″name″: ″displayName″, ″id″:″ownerId″ }, ″synced″: ″2018-09-07T17:49:33.667Z″ }

At step 220 an identity graph may be generated from the identitymanagement data obtained from the enterprise. Specifically, each of theidentities and entitlements from the most recent snapshot of identitymanagement data may be obtained and a node of the graph created for eachidentity and entitlement. An edge is constructed between every pair ofidentity nodes (e.g., identities) that shares at least one entitlement(e.g., an edge connects two identity nodes if and only if they have atleast one entitlement in common). An edge may also be constructedbetween every pair of entitlement nodes (e.g., entitlements) that sharesat least one identity (e.g., an edge connects two entitlement nodes ifand only if they have at least one identity in common).

Each edge of the graph joining identity nodes or entitlement nodes maybe associated with a similarity weight representing a degree ofsimilarity between the identities or entitlements of the respectivenodes joined by that edge. For identity nodes, the similarity weight ofan edge joining the two identity nodes may be generated based on thenumber of entitlements shared between the two joined nodes. As but oneexample, the similarity weight could be based on a count of thesimilarity (e.g., overlap or intersection of entitlements) between thetwo identities divided by the union of entitlements. Similarly, foridentity nodes, the similarity weight of an edge joining the twoentitlement nodes may be generated based on the number of identitiesshared between the two joined nodes. As but one example, the similarityweight could be based on a count of the similarity (e.g., overlap orintersection of identities) between the two entitlements divided by theunion of identities. For instance the similarity could be defined as theratio between a number of identities having both entitlements joined bythe edge to the number of identities that have either one (e.g.,including both) of the two entitlements.

In one embodiment, the edges are weighted via a proper similarityfunction (e.g., Jaccard similarity). In one embodiment, a dissimilaritymeasure, of entitlement or identity binary vectors, d, may be chosen,then the induced similarity, 1−d(x,y), may be used to assign asimilarity weight to the edge joining the nodes, x,y. Other methods fordetermining a similarity weight between two nodes are possible and arefully contemplated herein. Moreover, it will be noted here that while asimilarity weight may be utilized on edges between both identity nodesand entitlement nodes, the similarity weight type, determination andvalue may be determined differently based upon the respective type ofnode(s) being joined that weighted edge.

In one specific, embodiment, a symmetric matrix for identities (e.g., anidentity adjacency matrix) may be determined with each of the identitiesalong each axis of the matrix. The diagonal of the matrix may be all 0swhile the rest of values are the similarity weights determined betweenthe two (identity) nodes on the axes corresponding to the value. In thismanner, this symmetric matrix may be provided to a graph constructorwhich translates the identities on the axes and the similarity values ofthe matrix into graph store commands to construct the identity graph.Similarly, a symmetric matrix for entitlements (e.g., an entitlementadjacency matrix) may be determined with each of the entitlements alongeach axis of the matrix. The diagonal of the matrix may be all 0s whilethe rest of values are the similarity weights determined between the two(entitlement) nodes on the axes corresponding to the value. In thismanner, this symmetric matrix may be provided to a graph constructorwhich translates the entitlement on the axes and the similarity valuesof the matrix into graph store commands to construct the identity graph.

Accordingly, the identity management data may be faithfully representedby a graph, with k types of entities (nodes/vertices, e.g., identity-id,title, location, entitlement, etc.) and stored in a graph data store. Itwill be noted that graph data store 132 may be stored in any suitableformat and according to any suitable storage, including, for example, agraph store such a Neo4j, a triple store, a relational database, etc.Access and queries to this graph data store may thus be accomplishedusing an associated access or query language (e.g., such as Cypher inthe case where the Neo4j graph store is utilized).

Once the identity graph is generated, the graph may then be pruned atstep 230. Here, the identity graph may be pruned to remove weak edges(e.g., those edges whose similarity weight may fall below a pruningthreshold). The pruning of the graph is associated with the localityaspect of identity governance, where an identity's access entitlementsshould not be directly impacted, if at all, by another identity withstrongly dissimilar entitlement pattern (e.g., a weak connecting edge)or that determined should be based on strong commonality or popularityof entitlements within an identity grouping. Accordingly, the removal ofsuch edges may not dramatically alter the global topology of theidentity graph. An initial pruning threshold may be initially set ordetermined (e.g., as 50% similarity or the like) and may besubstantially optimized or otherwise adjusted at a later point. Asanother example, a histogram of similarity weights may be constructedand a similarity weight corresponding to a gap in the similarity weightsof the histogram may be chosen as an initial pruning threshold. Again,the pruning of edges between identity nodes and entitlements nodes maybe accomplished in the same, or a different manner. For example, thepruning threshold utilized to prune edges between identity nodes may bedifferent than a pruning threshold utilized to prune edges betweenentitlement nodes.

The pruned identity graph can then be used to cluster the identities orentitlements into peer groups of identities or peer groups ofentitlements at step 240. Within this graph approach, a representationof a peer group of identities could be represented by a maximal clique,where every identity is strongly connected (e.g., similar) to everyother identity within the identity peer group, and consequently, membersof the clique all share a relatively large, and hence dominant, commoncore of entitlements. A representation of an entitlement peer groupcould be represented by a maximal clique, where every entitlement isstrongly connected (e.g., similar) to every other entitlement within thepeer group, and consequently, members of the clique all share arelatively large, and hence dominant, common core of identities. Theproblem of finding all maximal cliques of a graph may, however, be amemory and computationally intensive problem. Most clique relatedproblems in graph theory are hard and some of them are even NP-complete,requiring exponential time to finish as graphs with exponentially manymaximal cliques may exist.

Accordingly, in one embodiment a community-detection algorithm may beutilized for peer grouping the identities or entitlements of theidentity graph to speed the determination of the peer groups, reducecomputational overhead and conserve memory, among other advantages. Aplethora of applicable and performant community-detection and graphclustering algorithms may be utilized according to certain embodiments.Some of these algorithms are specifically targeted to large graphs,which can be loosely described as graphs with at least tens or hundreds(or more) of thousands of nodes and millions of edges. Such graphcommunity-detection algorithms may include, for example, Louvain,Leiden, Fast-greedy, Label Propagation or Stochastic Block Modeling.Other graph community detection algorithms may be utilized and are fullycontemplated herein.

In certain embodiments, a clustering result may be optimized through theuse of a feedback loop, as discussed below. As such, in one embodimentit may be desirable to utilize a community-detection algorithm fordetermination of the peer groups that may provide allow astraightforward determination of a peer group assessment metric for aquality assessment of determined peer groups or the identity graph.Accordingly, a community-detection algorithm that may be based on, orallow a determination of, a graph based metric (e.g., modularity,evolving topology, connected components, centrality measures (e.g.,betweenness, closeness, community overlap measures such as NMI or Omegaindices)) that may be used as a peer group assessment metric may beutilized.

Specifically, in one embodiment, the Louvain algorithm may be utilizedas a community-detection algorithm and modularity may be used as a peerassessment metric. The Louvain algorithm may not only be a scalablealgorithm that can handle, and be efficient on, large graphs; butadditionally the Louvain algorithm may be based on modularity or bemodularity optimized. Modularity is a scalar that can be determined fora graph or groups or subgraphs thereof. This modularity reflects alikelihood of the clusters generated (e.g., by the algorithm) to nothave been generated by random chance. A high modularity value, (e.g.,positive and away from 0) may indicate that the clustering result isunlikely to be a product of chance. This modularity can thus be used asa peer group assessment metric.

Moreover, in addition to the application of a peer group assessmentmetric to optimize the peer groups or identity graphs determined usingsuch community-detection algorithms, an identity management system mayemploy alerts based these peer group assessment metrics. For example, analert to a user may be based on an alert threshold (e.g., if the peergroup assessment metric drops below or above a certain threshold) or ifany changes over a certain threshold occur with respect to the peergroup assessment metric. For example, setting an empirical low thresholdfor modularity, with combined user alerts, could serve as a warning fordeteriorating quality of peer groups or the identity graph. This couldbe due to input data has been corrupted at some point in pipeline, or inother cases, that the access entitlement process for the particularenterprise is extremely lacking due discipline. Regardless of theunderlying cause, such an early warning system may be valuable to stopthe propagation of questionable data quality in the peer groupassessment and determination process and more generally to identitymanagement goals within the enterprise.

In many cases, the community-detection or other clustering algorithmutilized in an embodiment may fall under the umbrella of what areusually termed unsupervised machine-learning. Results of these types ofunsupervised learning algorithms may leave some room for interpretation,and do not, necessarily or inherently, provide outputs that areoptimized when the domain or context in which they are being applied aretaken into account. Consequently, to mitigate some of these issues andto optimize the use of the peer groups and identity graphs in anidentity governance context, embodiments of identity management systemsemploying such peer groups of identities or entitlements using anidentity graph may allow some degree of user configuration, where at aleast a portion of the user configuration may be applied in the graphdetermination, peer-grouping or optimization of such peer groupdetermination.

This configurability may allow the user of an identity management systemto, for example, impose some constraints or set up certain configurationparameters for the community-detection (or other peer grouping)algorithm in order to enhance the clustering results for a particularuse-case or application. A few non-exhaustive examples of userconfiguration are thus presented. A user may have a strongly definedconcept of what constitutes a ‘peer’. This may entail that the user'sspecification of what continues a peer may be used to derive a pruningthreshold with statistical methods (e.g., rather than relying onmodularity).

As another example of configurability, a user may elect to opt for ahierarchical clustering output, or that peer groups should have certainaverage size, which may entail to allowing for several consecutiveiterations of the community-detection algorithm to be performed (as willbe explained in more detail herein). A user may also elect to run thepeer grouping per certain portions of the identities or entitlements,versus running it for all identities or entitlements. The filteredpopulation of identities or entitlements may be specified in terms ofgeographic location, business role, business unit, etc. Similarly, auser may elect to filter the outputs of the community-detectionalgorithm in terms of certain identity or entitlement attributes, e.g.,identity role, identity title, identity location, etc. The results mightthen be quantitatively and qualitatively contrasted against existinggovernance policies to measure, assess and certify compliance with thesepolicies.

Generally then, a user may elect to utilize the peer grouping feature incombination with other tools of identity governance, in order to gainmore insight into the quality of identity governance policy enforcementwithin the business. This entails that peer grouping should beconfigurable and flexible enough to allow it to be paired with other(e.g., third-party) identity management tools. Accordingly, certainrestrictions may be imposed on the identity graph's or peer group'ssize, format, level of detail, etc.

In any event, once the peer groups of identities or entitlements of thepruned identity graph are used to cluster the identities into peergroups of identities at step 240 the determined peer groups can then bestored (e.g., separately or in the identity graph itself) and used bythe identity management system. For example, each peer group (e.g., oridentities or entitlements) may be assigned a peer group identifier andthe peer group identifier associated with each identity assigned to thepeer group by storing the peer group identifier in association with thenode in the graph representing that identity or entitlement.

As an example of use a visual representation of the graph, theidentities, entitlements or the peer groups in the identity graph may bepresented to a user of the identity management to assist in complianceor certification assessments or evaluation of the identities andentitlements as currently used by the enterprise. In principle, strictlyenforced pre-existing governance policies should ensure that identitieswith strongly similar access privileges are strongly similar (e.g., arein the same peer group). The presentation of such peer groups may thus,for example, allow an auditor or compliance assessor to quantitativelyand qualitatively assess the effectiveness of any applicablepre-existing polices, or lack thereof, and how strictly they areenforced.

During such collection, graph determination and peer grouping steps, incertain embodiments, a number of efficiencies may be implemented tospeed the collection process, reduce the amount data that must be storedand to reduce the computer processing overhead and computing cyclesassociated with such data collection, graph determination and peergrouping of such data. Specifically, in one embodiment, a delta changeassessment may be performed when identity management data is collectedor peer groups are determined in a current time period. Morespecifically, if identity management data was collected in a previoustime period, or a previous peer grouping has been performed onidentities or entitlements of a previously created identity graph, anassessment can be made (e.g., by a data querying script or process) ofthe difference (or delta) between the set of identities or entitlementscorresponding to the most recent previous snapshot and the set ofidentities or entitlements obtained in the current time period. Thisassessment may comprise a determination of how many changes to theidentities, associated entitlements or other attributes have occurredbetween the time of the previous snapshot and the current snapshot(e.g., the most recently identity management data collected in thecurrent time period).

An assessment may also be made of the difference between the peer groupsdetermined from the most recent previous snapshot and the peer groupsobtained in the current time period. This assessment may comprise adetermination of how many identities or entitlements are associated withdifferent peer groups (e.g., relative to the peer grouping of identitiesor entitlements determined from the previous most recent snapshot),changes to the identities or entitlements or how many new identities areassociated with an established (or new) peer group.

If there are no determined changes, or the changes are below somethreshold number, or are few, local, or insignificant to a largemajority of existing peer groups, then no action is needed other thanupdating the affected identities or entitlements in the data of theprevious snapshot or the identity graph. New entries in the entriescomprising the current snapshot of identities or entitlements may becreated for any newly identified identities or entitlements.Additionally, nodes in the graph corresponding to new identities orentitlements can be appended to an appropriate peer group based on howsimilar this new identity to existing peer groups, (e.g., assign the newidentity the peer group of the same department/title).

If the differences (e.g., number of changes, new identities, differentpeer group assignments, etc.) are non-trivial, affecting a multitude ofidentities across peer groups, then a new peer grouping process mayoccur on the newly refreshed data. In such case, a detection algorithmmay be used to evolve, and persist, previously determined peer groupsinto their recent counterparts. This can be done by monitoring certain‘marker’ identities, e.g., influencers, or identities with highcentrality values and/or high degree of connections, in both versions ofpeer groups. Utilizing a majority vote approach, it can be determinedhow previous peer groups evolve into newer ones. Expected updatedversions of the previous peer group, include splitting, merging, growth,shrinkage. Newer split peer groups may, for example inherit the ‘old’peer group identifiers.

Embodiments of such a delta detection and updating mechanisms may havethe further advantage of allowing the quality and stability of each peergroup to be monitored by an identity management system via tracking thepeer groups or identity graph, the changes thereto, or their evolutionover time. By actively monitoring and assessing the degree of thesechanges between two or more consecutive versions of a peer group oridentity graph, deteriorating quality issues may be detected as theyarise or manifest in the identity graph or peer groups determinedtherefrom. Similarly, using the identity graphs, peer groups or peergroup assessment metrics determined therefrom, a graph evolution modelmay be built in certain embodiments, (e.g., based on epidemiologysusceptible, infected and recovered type models). Comparing the observedevolution of identities, entitlements or peer groups versus theoreticalpredictions may provide another tool to warn users of an identitymanagement system against rapid or extreme changes that may negativelyimpact the quality of peer groups or identity management more generally.

Again, once the peer groups of identities or entitlements are determinedfrom the pruned identity graph and stored (at step 240), a peer groupassessment metric may be determined based on the identity graph or thedetermined peer groups at step 250. As discussed, this peer groupassessment metric may be determined separately based on the peer groupsor identity graph determined, or may be metric utilized by acommunity-detection algorithm, such that the peer group assessmentmetric may be determined as part of the peer group determinationprocess. In certain embodiments then, the application of acommunity-detection algorithm may result in such a peer group assessmentmetric (e.g., modularity, evolving topology, connected components,centrality measures e.g., betweenness, closeness, community overlapmeasures (e.g., NMI, Omega indices)) that may be used as a peer groupassessment metric may be utilized.

For example, as discussed above the Louvain algorithm may be agraph-based modularity optimized community-detection algorithm. Thus, amodularity associated with the determined peer groups may result fromthe determination of the peer group using the Louvain algorithm.Modularity is a scalar that can be determined for a graph or groups orsubgraphs thereof and reflects a likelihood of the clusters generated(e.g., by the algorithm) to not have been generated by random chance. Ahigh modularity value, (e.g., positive and away from 0) may indicatethat the clustering result is unlikely to be a product of chance. Thismodularity can be used as a peer group assessment metric in oneembodiment.

Accordingly, in certain embodiments, the clustering of identities orentitlements into peer groups may be optimized based on this peer groupassessment metric. Specifically, a feedback loop may be utilized todetermine the optimal pruning threshold. The optimization loop may serveto substantially increase or maximize the quality of the graphclustering, with respect to certain proper metrics (e.g., graphmodularity or other peer group assessment metric). Additionaldomain-specific, per enterprise, criteria may be utilized in this stepin certain embodiments in order to render clustering results thataccurately reflect certain requirements to better serve a particularenterprise or use of the peer groups or identity graph.

For instance, in one embodiment if the peer group assessment metric isabove (or below) a quality threshold at step 260 the determination ofpeer groups of identities or entitlements for the obtained in thecurrent snapshot may end at step 262. The determined peer groups ofidentities or entitlements can then be stored (e.g., separately or inthe identity graph) and used by the identity management system.

However, if the peer group assessment metric is below (or above) aquality threshold at step 260 a feedback loop may be instituted wherebythe pruning threshold is adjusted by some amount at step 270 (up ordown) and the originally determined identity graph is again pruned basedon the adjusted pruning threshold (or the previously pruned identitygraph may be further pruned) at step 230. The adjustment of the pruningthreshold may be based on a wide variety of criteria in variousembodiments and may be adjust be a fixed or differing amount in everyiteration through the feedback loop. Additionally, in some embodiments,various machine learning techniques (e.g., unsupervised machine learningtechniques such as k-means, method of moments, neural networks, etc.)may be used to determine an amount to adjust the pruning threshold or avalue for the adjusted pruning threshold). This newly pruned identitygraph can then be clustered into new peer groups of identities orentitlements at step 240 and a peer group assessment metric determinedat step 250 based on the newly pruned identity graph or the newlydetermined peer groups.

If this new peer assessment metric is now above (or below) the qualitythreshold at step 260 the feedback loop may be stopped and thedetermination of peer groups of identities or entitlements for the dataobtained in the current snapshot may end at step 262. These peer groupsof identities or entitlements can then be stored (e.g., separately or inthe identity graph) and used by the identity management system.

Otherwise, the feedback loop may continue by again adjusting the pruningthreshold further at step 270 (e.g., further up or further down relativeto the previous iteration of the feedback loop), re-pruning the identitygraph based on the adjusted pruning threshold at step 230, clusteringthis newly pruned graph at step 240, determining another peer groupassessment metric at step 250 and comparing this metric to the qualitythreshold at step 260. In this manner, the feedback loop of adjustmentof the pruning threshold, re-pruning the graph and re-clustering theidentity graph into peer groups may be repeated until the peer groupassessment metric reaches a desired threshold. Moreover, by tailoringthe peer group assessment metric and quality threshold to include orreflect domain or enterprise specific criteria (e.g., which may bespecified by a user of the identity management system), the clusteringresults (e.g., the peer groups resulting from the clustering) may moreaccurately reflect particular requirements or the needs of a particularenterprise or be better tailored to a particular use.

Once the feedback loop is ended (step 262) the determined peer groups ofidentities or entitlements can then be stored (e.g., separately or inthe identity graph) and used by the identity management system. Forexample, a visual representation of the graph may be presented to a userof the identity management to assist in compliance or certificationassessments or evaluation of the identities and entitlements ascurrently used by the enterprise.

It will be noted here as well, that while the peer grouping of bothidentities or entitlements may be determined in embodiments, the peergrouping may be accomplished in the same or different manners foridentities and entitlements in different embodiments. For example, thecommunity detection, optimization, feedback loop or quality assessmentmetric (e.g., steps 230, 240, 250, 260 and 270) may all be performed thesame or differently when clustering the identity or entitlements of theentitlement graph. More generally, then, the pruning and clustering ofthe identity nodes of the identity graph may be performed separatelyfrom the pruning and clustering of the entitlement nodes of the identitygraph. In certain embodiments, for example, the pruning and clustering(e.g., steps 230, 240, 250, 260 and 270) of the identity nodes of theidentity graph may be performed as a separate process from the pruningand clustering (e.g., steps 230, 240, 250, 260 and 270) of theentitlement nodes of the identity graph. Accordingly, the identity graphmay be comprised of at least two subgraphs, the identities subgraphcomprising at least the identity nodes and edges between these identitynodes and the entitlement subgraph comprising at least the entitlementnodes and edges between those entitlement nodes.

It may now be helpful to look at such visual depictions andpresentations of identity graphs or interfaces that may be created orpresented based on such identity graphs. It will be apparent that thesedepictions and interfaces are but example of depictions and interfacesthat may presented or utilized, and that almost any type ofpresentation, depiction or interface based on the identities,entitlements, peer groups or other associated data discussed may beutilized in association with the embodiments of identity managementsystems disclosed herein.

As discussed, embodiments of the identity management systems asdisclosed may create, maintain or utilize identity graphs. Theseidentity graphs may include a graph comprised of nodes and edges, wherethe nodes may include identity management nodes representing, forexample, an identity, entitlement or peer group, and the edges mayinclude relationships between these identity management nodes. Therelationships represented by the edges of the identity graph may beassigned weights or scores indicating a degree of similarity between thenodes related by a relationship, including, for example, the similaritybetween two nodes representing an identity or two nodes representing anentitlement, as discussed. Additionally, the relationships may bedirectional, such that they may be traversed only in a single direction,or have different weightings depending on the direction in which therelationship is traversed or the nodes related. Embodiments of such anidentity graph can thus be searched (or navigated) to determine dataassociated with one or more nodes. Moreover, the similarity between, forexample, the identities or entitlements may be determined using theweights of the relationships in the identity graph.

Specifically, in certain embodiments, a property graph may be thought ofas a graph comprising a number of interrelated nodes. These nodes mayinclude nodes that may have labels defining the type of the node (e.g.,the type of “thing” or entity that the node represents, such as anidentity, entitlement or peer group) and properties that define theattributes or data of that node. For example, the labels of the nodes ofan identity graph may include “Identity”, “Entitlement” or “PeerGroup”.Properties of a node may include, “id”, “company”, “dept”, “title”,“location”, “source” “size”, “clique”, “mean_similarity”, or the like.

The nodes of the property graph may be interrelated using relationshipsthat form the edges of the graph. A relationship may connect two nodesin a directional manner. These relationships may also have a label thatdefines the type of relationship and properties that define theattributes or data of that relationship. These properties may include anidentification of the nodes related by the relationship, anidentification of the directionality of the relationship or a weight ordegree of affinity for the relationship between the two nodes. Forexample, the labels of the relationships of an identity graph mayinclude “Similarity” or “SIM”, “Has_Entitlement” or “HAS_ENT”,“Belongs_To_PeerGroup” or “BELONGS_TO_PG”, or the like.

Referring then to FIG. 3A, a graphical depiction of a portion of anexample identity graph 300 is depicted. Here, nodes are represented bycircles and relationships are represented by the directional arrowsbetween the nodes. Such an identity graph 300 may represent identities,entitlements or peer groups, their association, and the degree ofsimilarity between identities represented by the nodes. Thus, forexample, the identity nodes 302 a, 302 b have the label “Identity”indicating they are identity nodes. Identity node 302 b is shown asbeing associated with a set of properties that define the attributes ordata of that identity node 302 b, including here that the “id” ofidentity node 302 b is “a123”, the “company” of identity node 302 b is“Ajax”, the “dept” of identity node 302 b is “Sales”, the “title” ofidentity node 302 b is “Manager”, and the “location” of identity node302 b is “Austin, Tex.”.

These identity nodes 302 of the identity graph 300 are joined by edgesformed by directed relationships 312 a, 312 b. Directed relationship 312a may represent that the identity of identity node 302 a is similar to(represented by the labeled “SIM” relationship 312 a) the identityrepresented by identity node 302 b. Similarly, directed relationship 312b may represent that the identity of identity node 302 b is similar to(represented by the labeled “SIM” relationship 312 b) the identityrepresented by identity node 302 a. Here, relationship 312 b has beenassigned a similarity weight of 0.79. Notice that while theserelationships 312 a, 312 b are depicted as individual directionalrelationships, such a similar relationship may be a single bidirectionalrelationship assigned a single similarity weight.

Entitlement nodes 304 a, 304 b have the label “Entitlement” indicatingthat they are entitlement nodes. Entitlement node 304 a is shown asbeing associated with a set of properties that define the attributes ordata of that entitlement node 304 a, including here that the “id” ofentitlement node 304 is “ad137”, and the “source” of entitlement node304 a is “Active Directory”. Entitlement node 304 b is shown as beingassociated with a set of properties that define the attributes or dataof that entitlement node 304 b, including here that the “id” ofentitlement node 304 b is “ad179”, and the “source” of entitlement node304 a is “Active Directory”.

These entitlement nodes 304 of the identity graph 300 are joined byedges formed by directed relationships 312 c, 312 d. Directedrelationship 312 c may represent that the entitlement node 304 a issimilar to (represented by the labeled “SIM” relationship 312 c) theentitlement represented by entitlement node 304 b. Similarly, directedrelationship 312 d may represent that the entitlement of entitlementnode 304 b is similar to (represented by the labeled “SIM” relationship312 d) the entitlement represented by entitlement node 304 a. Here,relationship 312 c has been assigned a similarity weight of 0.65. Noticethat while these relationships 312 c, 312 d are depicted as individualdirectional relationships, such a similar relationship may be a singlebidirectional relationship assigned a single similarity weight.

Identity node 302 b and entitlement nodes 304 a, 304 b of the identitygraph 300 are joined by edges formed by directed relationships 316, 316.Directed relationships 316 may represent that the identity of identitynode 302 b has (represented by the labeled “HAS_ENT” relationships 316)the entitlements represented by entitlement nodes 304 a, 304 b.

Peer group node 306 a has the label “PeerGroup” indicating that it is apeer group node. Peer group node 306 a is shown as being associated witha set of properties that define the attributes or data of that peergroup node 306 a, including here that the “id” of peer group node 306 ais “pg314”, the “size” of peer group node 306 a is “287”, the “clique”of peer group node 306 a is “0.83” and the “mean_sim” or mean similarityvalue of peer group node 306 a is “0.78”. Identity node 302 b and peergroup node 306 a of the identity graph 300 are joined by an edge formedby directed relationship 314 a. Directed relationship 314 a mayrepresent that the identity of identity node 302 b belongs to(represented by the labeled “BELONGS_TO_PG” relationship 314 a) the peergroup represented by peer group node 306 a.

Peer group node 306 b has the label “PeerGroup” indicating that it is apeer group node. Peer group node 306 b is shown as being associated witha set of properties that define the attributes or data of that peergroup node 306 b, including here that the “id” of peer group node 306 bis “pg763”, the “size” of peer group node 306 b is “146”, the “clique”of peer group node 306 b is “0.74” and the “mean_sim” or mean similarityvalue of peer group node 306 b is “0.92”. Entitlement node 304 a andpeer group node 306 b of the identity graph 300 are joined by an edgeformed by directed relationship 314 b. Directed relationship 314 b mayrepresent that the identity of entitlement node 304 a belongs to(represented by the labeled “BELONGS_TO_PG” relationship 314 b) the peergroup represented by peer group node 306 b.

Entitlement nodes 308 a, 308 b have the label “Role” indicating thatthey are Role nodes. Role node 308 a is shown as being associated with aset of properties that define the attributes or data of that Role node308 a, including here that the “id” of entitlement node 308 a is“Role_0187”. Role node 308 b is shown as being associated with a set ofproperties that define the attributes or data of that role node 308 b,including here that the “id” of role node 308 b is “Role_3128”. Directedrelationship 318 may represent that the identity of identity node 302 bhas (represented by the labeled “HAS_ROLE” relationship 318) the rolerepresented by role node 308 a. Directed relationship 320 may representthat the entitlement of entitlement node 304 a is a part of or includedin (represented by the labeled “PART_OF” relationship 320) the rolerepresented by role node 308 a.

These role nodes 308 of the identity graph 300 are joined by edgesformed by directed relationships 312 e, 312 f. Directed relationship 312e may represent that the role represented by role node 304 a is similarto the role represented by role node 304 b. Similarly, directedrelationship 312 f may represent that the role represented by role node308 b is similar to the role represented by role node 308 a. Here,relationship 312 e has been assigned a similarity weight of 0.34. Again,notice that while these relationships 312 e, 312 f are depicted asindividual directional relationships, such a similar relationship may bea single bidirectional relationship assigned a single similarity weight.

FIG. 3B is a graphical depiction of an entitlement graph and thesubgraphs or clusters that may result from different pruning thresholds.In particular, entitlement graph 350 may be an initial cluster ofentitlement nodes with edges having similarity weights (e.g., which maybe determined as discussed) where the entitlement graph has been prunedinitially and clustered according to a 0.5 pruning threshold for thesimilarity weight. Entitlement graph 360 is a result of pruning theentitlement graph 350 according to a higher pruning threshold of 0.8 andclustering. Here, two subgraphs 362 a, 362 b may result from such apruning.

Now referring to FIGS. 3C, 3D and 3E, example representations of peergroupings within identity graphs are depicted. Here, each identity nodeof an identity graph is represented by a circle and each edge isrepresented by a line joining the nodes. In these visual depictions, thecloser the nodes the higher the similarity value between the nodes. Suchvisual depictions when presented to a user may allow a user to betterperceive the number of identities utilized by an enterprise, therelationships between those identities, the distribution of entitlementswith respect to those identities or other information related to theidentities or entitlements that may be utilized in identity governanceand management, including for example, compliance assessment orauditing.

FIG. 4 depicts an embodiment of an interface that may be utilized by anidentity management system to visually present data regarding the peergroups determined for identities within an enterprise. In this example,the enterprise has 9235 associated identities, and the interface depictsthat there are 6 peer groups of those identities that have beendetermined based on the entitlements associated with the identities.Each of the depicted circles 410 within the interface represents one ofthe peer groups and displays the number of identities associated witheach of those peer groups. Moreover, the size and location of eachcircle 410 may depict the relative size of the peer groups of theidentities and the number of entitlements shared between those peergroups, or identities within those peer groups.

FIG. 5 depicts an embodiment of interface that may be utilized by anidentity management system to visually present data regarding the peergroups determined for identities within an enterprise. Here, theinterface may present a visual representation of the identity graph asdiscussed above where each identity node is represented by a circle andeach edge is represented by a line joining the nodes, where the closerthe nodes the higher the similarity value between the nodes. Theinterface may also present information regarding the number of peergroups (clusters) determined for the identity graph being presented (inthis example 11).

The interface, or a portion thereof, may allow the user to navigatearound the identity graph and “drill down” to obtain information on arepresented node or entitlement. In the depicted example, the user hashovered above a node 510 of the identity graph and information aboutthat identity is presented through the interface to the user. By lookingat such an identity graph a user may be able to discern, for example,which identities which may be “highly contagious” or represent otheridentity management risks or compliance issues. An identity may be“highly contagious” or otherwise represent an identity governance risk,for example, if that identity has a number or type of entitlements suchthat if those identities are replicated without identity governanceoversight (e.g., assigned to other users) it may cause identitygovernance issues such as unintended entitlement bloom.

FIG. 6 depicts an embodiment of another interface that may be utilizedby an identity management system to visually present data regarding thepeer groups determined for identities within an enterprise. In thisexample, the interface can present data regarding a particular peergroup determined for an identity graph, showing, for example, the numberof identities within that peer group, what the entitlements are withinthat peer group, what identities share those entitlements, or why thoseidentities have been grouped together. The interface may also present awide variety of other data regarding that peer group or identities orentitlements within that (or other) peer groups, including for example,how that peer group, identities within that peer group or otherentitlements relate to each other or other determined peer groups,identities or entitlements of the enterprise. Thus, a user viewing suchan interface may be able to ascertain reasons why the identities havebeen grouped and explore for outliers and see entitlements that theseidentities have in common with each other, as well as how different theyare from the rest of the identities and entitlements of an enterprise.Moreover, the user may also “drill down” for more details to discoverwhich identities included and the entitlements assigned.

FIG. 7 depicts an embodiment of still another interface that may beutilized by an identity management system to visually present dataregarding the peer groups determined for identities within anenterprise. In this example, the interface can present data regarding aparticular peer group (e.g., peer group 43) determined for an identitygraph, showing, for example, distributions of identities within the peergroup, such as the identities of the peer group's correlation withdepartments, location or job title.

It will now be recalled from the discussions above, that what is desiredin the context of identity governance solutions as discussed herein, areidentity management solutions that allow for bottom-up role mining.While frequent pattern mining may be utilized to accomplish such rolemining, such pattern mining may be combinatorial in nature and may notscale in a manner that allows for any sort of efficient implementationof role mining in real-time or other contexts where a large number ofidentities and entitlements may be involved.

The use of an identity graph for such role mining may, however, allowrole mining that is scalable and efficient, where the role mining can bebased on the nature of these identity graphs as disclosed, wherebypopular or dominant entitlement patterns may be manifested as peergroups, densely connected components, cliques or pseudo cliques ofidentity nodes due to the dominant entitlement pattern which identitynodes within such a group may have as a result of the nature of theidentity graph. Likewise, within an entitlement subgraph, a dominant orpopular entitlement pattern may be manifested as a peer-group, denselyconnected component, clique, or pseudo-clique of entitlement nodes dueto the fact that the pattern of entitlements may be shared by a sizeableset of identities as a result of the nature of the identity graph.Accordingly, the nature of an identity graph may allow the flexibilityto pursue role mining on either subgraph, the identities subgraph or theentitlement subgraph (or both, or some combination, of these graphs).

Embodiments of identity management systems as disclosed may thus providerole mining based on an identity graph determined by the identitymanagement system. In particular, embodiments as disclosed may utilizethe peer grouping of an identity graph (or peer grouping of portions orsubgraphs thereof) to identify roles from peer groups or the like (e.g.,peer groups or other densely connected components or clusters such ascliques or pseudo-cliques).

According to embodiments, therefore, an identity graph may beconstructed. A portion of the identity graph may then be determined,where this portion may include the entire identity graph, the entireentitlement subgraph, the entire identities subgraph, a portion of theentitlement subgraph or a portion of the identities subgraph. Peergroups of identities or entitlements of the portion of the identitygraph can then be determined. From these peer groups a set of roles maybe determined. Specifically, a set of entitlements may be determinedfrom a peer group (e.g., of identities or entitlements), where thedetermined set of entitlements may represent a determined role. Theseroles (e.g., an identifier for the determined role and associatedentitlements) may then be stored by the identity management system forpresentation to a user or other uses.

In one embodiment, the entire entitlement subgraph of the identity graphmay be peer grouped substantially as discussed above, and each peergroup of entitlements used as a determined role. In other words,according to these types of embodiments, the set of entitlements foreach determined peer group of entitlements may represent a determinedrole. In certain other embodiments, these peer groups of entitlementsmay themselves be separated into densely connected components, cliques,or pseudo-cliques (if any exist) and the set of entitlements extractedfrom each of these densely connected components, cliques, orpseudo-cliques used to define the determined roles.

While the peer groups of entitlements may be utilized to perform roledetermination in some embodiments, it may also be observed that in manycases it is highly likely that peer groups of identities may themselvesbe associated with a role. This likelihood arises at because the peergrouping of identities may be based on the similarity (as represented bythe edges of the identity graph) between those identities, where thesimilarity is, in turn, based on the number of shared entitlements.Accordingly, in certain embodiments, a set of entitlements may beextracted from each peer group of identities as determined for anidentity graph (or identities subgraph), and the set of entitlementsextracted from each of these identity peer groups used to define thedetermined roles.

To extract the set of entitlements from an identity peer group, anentitlement extraction threshold may be utilized such that anentitlement will be extracted from the identity peer group if thisentitlement extraction threshold is exceeded with respect to thatentitlement. This entitlement extraction threshold may be based on, forexample, a threshold number, ratio or percentage of identities of theidentity peer group that have that entitlement. By utilizing theidentity peer groups to extract the set of entitlements for thedetermination of roles, in certain embodiments, the creation of theentitlement subgraph or the peer grouping of the entitlement subgraphmay be avoided, substantially improving the performance of identitymanagement systems by reducing the time, memory or processor cyclesrequired to perform such role mining.

It will be noted here that some enterprises may have on the order ofmillions or more of entitlements or identities. Thus, the constructionof the identity or entitlement graphs and the peer grouping of thecomplete set of identities or entitlements may prove prohibitive,especially in the context of real-time implementations of identitymanagement systems and interfaces. Accordingly, other embodiments mayfurther improve the computing performance of identity management systemsby scoping the identities or entitlements to confine the graphconstruction, peer grouping or role determination used to determine theroles. Specifically, in one embodiment, a scoping attribute may beobtained or otherwise determined. This attribute may, for example, beprovided by a user and relate to an attribute of an identity such as atitle, location, department, peer group of an identity, or other datathat may be obtained or associated with an identity (e.g., inassociation with the identity in identity management data obtained froman identity management system or in an identity graph).

Accordingly, in embodiments where an identity graph has beenconstructed, an identity graph may exist (e.g., have been created at aprevious point) and the scoping attribute may be used to determine asubgraph of the existing identity graph to prune or to peer group inorder that roles may then be determined from this subgraph. Here, ascoped identities subgraph or scoped entitlement subgraph of theidentity or entitlement graphs, respectively, may be determined from theidentity graph based on the scoping attribute. Specifically, in oneembodiment a scoped entitlement subgraph associated with a scopingattribute may be determined from an identity graph by querying theidentity graph based on the identity attribute to find the entitlementnodes and edges associated with the scoping attribute. Such querying mayinvolve, for example, querying the identity graph to determine theidentity nodes of the graph associated with the scoping attribute anddetermining the entitlement nodes and edges along any path of theidentity graph originating with each of those scoped identity nodes.Similarly, a scoped identity subgraph associated with a scopingattribute may be determined from an identity graph by querying theidentity graph based on the identity attribute to find the scopedidentity nodes and edges associated with the scoping attribute. Suchquerying may involve, for example, querying the identity graph todetermine the identity nodes of the graph associated with the scopingattribute and determining the identity nodes and edges along any path ofthe identity graph originating with each of those scoped identity nodes.

The pruning and peer grouping of the identities subgraph of the scopedidentity subgraph or the entitlements of the scoped entitlement subgraphcan then be accomplished substantially as discussed to determinepeer-groups of the scoped identities or peer groups of the scopedentitlements. The peer groups of identities or entitlements can then beused for role mining. For example, a set of entitlements may beextracted from each peer group of identities as determined for thescoped identities subgraph of the identity graph, and the set ofentitlements extracted from each of these identity peer groups used todefine the determined roles. Similarly, the scoped entitlement subgraphof the identity graph may be peer grouped substantially as discussedabove, and each peer group of entitlements used as a determined role.

In certain embodiments, such as when no identity graph has beenpreviously constructed, the scoping attribute may be used in theconstruction of an identity graph. In these types of embodiments, theidentity management data of obtained from the identity management (e.g.,a most recent snapshot of the identity management data) may be searchedbased on the scoping attribute to determine the identities of theidentity management data associated with that scoping attribute (e.g.,identities having that title, location, department, etc.) and theentitlements associated with those determined identities. Once thisscoped set of identities and entitlements is determined, an identitygraph may be generated from the scoped set of identities andentitlements substantially as discussed above, where a node of the graphis created for each scoped identity and entitlement, and weighted edgesare constructed between every pair of identity nodes that shares atleast one entitlement and between every pair of entitlement nodes thatshares at least one identity. The pruning and peer grouping of theidentities subgraph or the entitlements subgraph of the scoped identitygraph can then be accomplished substantially as discussed to determinepeer-groups of the scoped identities or peer groups of the scopedentitlements. The peer groups of identities or entitlements can then beused for role mining.

For example, a set of entitlements may be extracted from each peer groupof identities as determined for the identities subgraph of the scopedidentity graph, and the set of entitlements extracted from each of theseidentity peer groups used to define the determined roles. Similarly, theentitlement subgraph of the scoped identity graph may be peer groupedsubstantially as discussed above, and each peer group of entitlementsused as a determined role. It will be noticed here, that in instanceswhere it is desired to only utilize a entitlement subgraph or anidentity subgraph for role mining, only an identities subgraph or anentitlements subgraph may be created from the scoped set of identitiesor entitlements, and this subgraph pruned and clustered as described toyield the desired identity peer groups or entitlement peer groups toutilize for such role mining.

Referring to FIG. 8 , a distributed networked computer environmentincluding an identity management system with one embodiment of a roleminer is depicted. As discussed above, the networked computerenvironment may include an enterprise computing environment 800including a number of computing devices or applications that may becoupled over a computer network 802 or combination of computer networks.Enterprise environment 800 may thus include a number of resources,various resource groups and users associated with an enterprise. Usersmay have various roles, job functions, responsibilities, etc. to performwithin various processes or tasks associated with enterprise environment800.

Users may access resources of the enterprise environment 800 to performfunctions associated with their jobs, obtain information aboutenterprise 800 and its products, services, and resources, enter ormanipulate information regarding the same, monitor activity inenterprise 800, order supplies and services for enterprise 800, manageinventory, generate financial analyses and reports, or generally toperform any task, activity or process related to the enterprise 800.Thus, to accomplish their responsibilities, users may have entitlementsto access resources of the enterprise environment 800. Theseentitlements may give rise to risk of negligent or malicious use ofresources.

Specifically, to accomplish different functions, different users mayhave differing access entitlements to differing resources. Some accessentitlements may allow particular users to obtain, enter, manipulate,etc. information in resources which may be relatively innocuous. Someaccess entitlements may allow particular users to manipulate informationin resources of the enterprise 800 which might be relatively sensitive.Some sensitive information can include human resource files, financialrecords, marketing plans, intellectual property files, etc. Access tosensitive information can allow negligent or malicious activities toharm the enterprise itself. Access risks can thus result from a userhaving entitlements with which the user can access resources that theparticular user should not have access to for other reasons. Accessrisks can also arise from roles in enterprise environment 800 which mayshift, change, evolve, etc. leaving entitlements non optimallydistributed among various users.

To assist in managing the entitlements assigned to various users andmore generally in managing and assessing access risks in enterpriseenvironment 800, an identity management system 850 may be employed. Suchan identity management system 850 may allow an administrative or othertype of user to define one or more identities and one or moreentitlements and associate these identities with entitlements using, forexample, an administrator interface 852. Moreover, an identitymanagement system 850 may allow such a user to define one or more rolesfor the enterprise, where these defined enterprise roles are defined ascollections of access entitlements or access profiles and may beassigned to identities through the identity management system 850 basedon specific rules of the enterprise in terms of the identity'sattributes, their expected responsibilities within the organization, orother criteria. These enterprise roles as defined by the user throughthe identity management system 850 may thus define an ideal or ‘golden’state of the roles of an enterprise.

Examples of such identity management systems are Sailpoint's IdentityIQand IdentityNow products. Note here, that while the identity managementsystem 850 has been depicted in the diagram as separate and distinctfrom the enterprise environment 800 and coupled to enterpriseenvironment 800 over a computer network 804 (which may the same as, ordifferent than, network 802), it will be realized that such an identitymanagement system 850 may be deployed as part of the enterpriseenvironment 800, remotely from the enterprise environment, as a cloudbased application or set of services, or in another configuration.

The identity management system 850 may thus store identity managementdata 854. The identity management data 854 stored may include a set ofentries, each entry corresponding to and including an identity (e.g.,alphanumerical identifiers for identities) as defined and managed by theidentity management system, a list or vector of entitlements (e.g.,alphanumeric identifiers for entitlements) assigned to that identity bythe identity management system, a list or vector of enterprise rolesassigned to that identity, and a timestamp at which the identitymanagement data was collected from the identity management system. Otherdata could also be associated with each identity, including data thatmay be provided from other systems such as a title, location ordepartment associated with the identity. The set of entries may alsoinclude entries corresponding to entitlements and roles, where eachentry for a role may include the role identifier (e.g., alphanumericalidentifier or name for the role) and a list or vector of theentitlements associated with each role. Other data could also beassociated with each role, such as a title, location or departmentassociated with the role.

Accordingly, the collectors 856 of the identity management system 850may obtain or collect event data from various systems within theenterprise environment 800 and process the event data to associate theevent data with the identities defined in the identity management data854 to evaluate or analyze these events or other data in an identitymanagement context. As part of a robust identity management system, itis desirable to analyze the identity management data 854 associated withan enterprise 800. Accordingly, an identity management system 860 mayinclude a harvester 862 and a graph generator 864. The harvester 862 mayobtain identity management data 854 from one or more identity managementsystems 850 associated with enterprise 800. Graph generator 864 mayallow an identity graph or subgraphs thereof to be generated from theobtained identity management data 854 and stored in graph data store866. Interfaces 868 of the identity management system 860 or interface858 may use a graph in the graph data store 866 or associated peergroups to present one or more interfaces which may be used for riskassessment, including the presentation of roles mined from such graphs.

Additionally, a user may interact with the identity management system850 through a user interface 858 to access or manipulate data onidentities, entitlements, events, roles or generally perform identitymanagement with respect to enterprise environment 800. As but oneexample, as the roles, entitlements and identities of an enterpriseevolve they may stray in substantial and detrimental ways from an idealstate, or other identity governance desires, of the enterprise. Users ofan identity management system may thus wish to determine a currentdata-driven assessment of the current role structure for theirenterprise.

By determining a current snapshot of the roles mined from an actualstate of their identity governance structure, the ‘golden’ enterpriseroles as defined by the users of the enterprise may be compared with themined roles to reduce discrepancies therebetween, including for example,the identification of new roles, the evolution of the enterprise definedroles to match the evaluation of the actual role structure (e.g., themined roles), or the performance housekeeping on the assignment ofentitlements or roles within the enterprise to more particularly tailorthe actual role structure to the ideal role structure. Additionally, byviewing the mined roles extraneous, singleton or outlier entitlementsthat have been deprecated or are in need of certification may beidentified.

Accordingly, it is desirable for identity management solutions to offera role mining capability whereby collections of entitlements may beascertained from the identity management data associated withenterprise. Embodiments of identity management system 850 may thusprovide a role mining tool through the user interface 858. In thismanner, a user may be presented with the ability to perform role miningthrough the user interface 858 (or interface 868), along with anoptional attribute or criteria to scope the mining of the roles. One ormore interfaces with the results of the role mining can then bedetermined and presented to the user through the role mining tool ofuser interface 858.

To provide such a role mining tool, identity management system 860 mayinclude role miner 880. Role miner 880 may include an interface 882.When a request for role mining is received from the user through theuser interface 858, a request to perform role mining can be submitted tothe role miner 880 from the identity management system 850 (e.g., oruser interface 858 or other component of identity management system 850)through the interface 882, where the request may include zero or morescoping attributes that may have been provided by the user through theuser interface. The request may include other criteria or attributes,such as a pruning threshold to utilize when creating an identity graphor subgraph or a role size which may be used to determine which graphsor subgraphs to utilize when performing role extraction. Note here, thatwhile the identity management system 850 has been depicted in thediagram as separate and distinct from the identity management system 860and coupled to identity management system 860 over a computer network804, it will be realized that such an identity management system 850 andidentity management system 860 may be deployed as part of the sameidentity management system or different identity management system, as acloud based application or set of services, or in another configurationentirely.

As such, when a request for role mining and the zero or more associatescoping (or other) attributes are received through the role minterinterface 882, the role miner 880 may preform role mining as discussed.In particular, in one embodiment, the role miner may determine if thereis an identity graph in graph data store 866, or if the identity graphcurrently in graph data store 866 was created within some previous timewindow (e.g., last hour, last twenty four hours, last week, etc.). Ifthere is an identity graph available (e.g., if one exists in the graphdata store 866 or was created within the time window), the role miner880 can determine if a scoring attribute was received with the rolemining request. If no scoring attribute was received, the availableidentity graph may be used for role mining. If, however, a scoringattribute was received and an identity graph is available, the existingidentity graph can be scoped based on the received scoring attribute andthe type of role mining to be performed. As discussed, the role miner880 may perform role mining based on an identities subgraph, anentitlement subgraph, or some combination according to variousembodiments. The type of role mining to be performed may, for example,be configured by an administrator of the identity management system 860or may be specified by a user in a request for role mining using therole mining interface 858.

Accordingly, in embodiments where an identity graph has beenconstructed, an identity graph may exist (e.g., have been created at aprevious point) in the graph data store 866 and the scoping attributemay be used to determine a subgraph of the existing identity graph touse as a role mining graph. Peer groups may be determined from that rolemining graph in order that roles may be then be determined from thissubgraph. Here, a scoped identities subgraph or scoped entitlementsubgraph of the identity graph may be determined from the identity graphbased on the scoping attribute and the type of role mining to beperformed.

Specifically, in one embodiment a scoped entitlement subgraph associatedwith a scoping attribute may be determined from an identity graph byquerying the identity graph in the graph data store 866 based on thescoping attribute to find the entitlement nodes and edges associatedwith the scoping attribute. Such querying may involve, for example,querying the identity graph to determine the identity nodes of the graphassociated with the scoping attribute and determining the entitlementnodes and edges along any path of the identity graph originating witheach of those scoped identity nodes.

Similarly, a scoped identity subgraph associated with a scopingattribute may be determined from an identity graph in the graph datastore 866 by querying the identity graph based on the identity attributeto find the scoped identity nodes and edges associated with the scopingattribute. Such querying may involve, for example, querying the identitygraph to determine the identity nodes of the graph associated with thescoping attribute and determining the identity nodes and edges along anypath of the identity graph originating with each of those scopedidentity nodes.

Once a graph to utilize for role mining is determined (e.g., the entireavailable identity graph, the scoped identities subgraph, the scopedentitlement subgraph or some combination), the peer groups of this rolemining graph may be determined. In some cases, in instances where anidentity graph is available the identity graph may also have beenpreviously pruned and peer grouped. Thus, the peer groups associatedwith the role mining graph to use for role mining may be determined byaccessing the peer groups previously determined for the identity graphthat are associated with the nodes of the role mining graph. Forexample, if identity peer groups are to be utilized for role mining, theidentity peer groups associated with the identity nodes of the rolemining graph may be determined from the previously determinedentitlement peer groups for the identity graph. Likewise, if entitlementpeer groups are to be utilized for role mining, the entitlement peergroups associated with the entitlement nodes of the role mining graphmay be determined from the previously determined entitlement peer groupsfor the identity graph.

If however, peer groups have not been determined for the availableidentity graph, the role mining graph (e.g., the entire availableidentity graph, the scoped identities subgraph, the scoped entitlementsubgraph or some combination) may be peer grouped as discussed abovebased on the type of role mining to be performed. For example, thepruning and peer grouping of a role mining graph comprising a scopedidentities subgraph or a scoped entitlement subgraph can be accomplishedsubstantially as discussed to determine identity peer-groups of thescoped identities or entitlement peer groups of the scoped entitlements.

These peer groups of identities or entitlements can then be used by therole miner for role mining. For example, a set of entitlements may beextracted from each peer group of identities determined for a rolemining graph (e.g., a scoped identities subgraph of the identity graph),and the set of entitlements extracted from each of these identity peergroups used to define the determined roles. To extract the set ofentitlements from an identity peer group, an entitlement extractionthreshold may be utilized such that an entitlement will be extractedfrom the identity peer group if this entitlement extraction threshold isexceeded with respect to that entitlement. This entitlement extractionthreshold may be based on, for example, a threshold number, ratio orpercentage of identities of the identity peer group that have thatentitlement. Similarly, in cases where the role mining graph is a scopedentitlement subgraph of the identity graph, the entitlements of the rolemining graph may be peer grouped substantially as discussed above, andeach peer group of entitlements used as a determined role.

In instances where the role miner 880 receives a request for role miningand zero or more associated scoping attributes and there is no identitygraph currently in graph data store 866 (or the graph in the graph datastore 866 was created outside of some previous time window), a rolemining graph may be determined from the identity management data 854 andthe type of role mining to be performed.

In particular, according to certain embodiments the role miner 880 candetermine if a scoping attribute was received with the received request.If there is no scoping attribute, identity management data 854 may beobtained and an identity graph (or identities subgraph or entitlementssubgraph) constructed as previously discussed. The type of graphconstructed for use as a role mining graph may be dependent on the typeof role mining to be performed as discussed.

However, if a scoping attribute was received, the identity managementdata 854 obtained from the identity management system 850 (e.g., a mostrecent snapshot of the identity management data) may be scoped based onthe attribute by searching the identity management data 854 based on thescoping attribute to determine the identities of the identity managementdata 854 associated with that scoping attribute (e.g., identities havingthat title, location, department, etc.) and the entitlements associatedwith those determined identities determined.

Once this scoped set of identities and entitlements is determined, arole mining graph (e.g., an identity graph, identities subgraph orentitlements subgraph) may be generated from the scoped set ofidentities and entitlements substantially as discussed above, where anode of the graph is created for each scoped identity and entitlement,and weighted edges are constructed between every pair of identity nodesthat shares at least one entitlement and between every pair ofentitlement nodes that shares at least one identity.

The pruning and peer grouping of the role mining graph constructed fromthe scoped identity management data (e.g., the identity graph,entitlement subgraph, identities subgraph) can then be accomplishedsubstantially as discussed to determine peer-groups of the scopedidentities or peer groups of the scoped entitlements. The determinedpeer groups of identities or entitlements can then be used for rolemining depending on the type of role mining to be accomplished. If apruning threshold has been provided by a user this pruning threshold maybe utilized in pruning the role mining graph. Additionally, if a rolesize has been provided this may be utilized during role mining such thatrole will only be extracted from subgraphs of the role mining graph thathave a number of nodes exceeding the role size.

Once the role miner 880 has determined the set of entitlementscomprising each of the mined roles, these mined roles may be presentedto the user through interface 858 of the identity management system 850.These roles may, for example, be assigned an identifier by the roleminer 880 (e.g., an assigned alphanumerical identifier or a semanticidentifier that may be determined, for example, from identities orentitlements associated with the role). The roles may then be presentedgraphically in an interface 858 with which the user may interact todetermine additional or different data about the presented roles.

FIG. 9 depicts one embodiment of a method for role mining that may beused in embodiments of an identity management system such as thosedisclosed herein. Initially, at step 910 a request to perform rolemining can be received, where the request may include zero or morescoping attributes (e.g., that may have been provided by the user orotherwise determined). At step 920 it can be determined if an identitygraph is available. This determination may involve determining if anidentity graph has been previously created or is a previously createidentity graph was created within some previous time window (e.g., lasthour, last twenty four hours, last week, etc.).

If there is an identity graph available (Yes branch of step 920), it canthen be determined at step 930 determine if a scoping attribute wasreceived with the role mining request. If no scoring attribute wasreceived (No branch of step 930), the available identity graph may beused for role mining. If, however, a scoring attribute was received andan identity graph is available (Yes branch of step 930), the existingidentity graph can be scoped at step 940 based on the received scoringattribute and the type of role mining to be performed. As discussed, therole mining may be performed based on an identities subgraph, anentitlement subgraph, or some combination according to variousembodiments.

Accordingly, in embodiments where an identity graph has beenconstructed, an identity graph may exist (e.g., have been created at aprevious point) and the scoping attribute may be used to determine asubgraph of the existing identity graph to use as a role mining graph.Peer groups may be determined from that role mining graph in order thatroles may be then be determined from this subgraph. Here, at step 940, ascoped identities subgraph or scoped entitlement subgraph of theidentity graph may be determined from the identity graph based on thescoping attribute and the type of role mining to be performed.

Specifically, in one embodiment a scoped entitlement subgraph associatedwith a scoping attribute may be determined from an identity graph byquerying a previously created identity graph based on the scopingattribute to find the entitlement nodes and edges associated with thescoping attribute. Similarly, a scoped identity subgraph associated witha scoping attribute may be determined from a previously created identitygraph by querying the identity graph based on the identity attribute tofind the scoped identity nodes and edges associated with the scopingattribute.

Once a graph to utilize for role mining at is determined at step 940,the peer groups of this role mining graph may be determined at step 950.In many cases, in instances where an identity graph is available theidentity graph may also have been previously pruned and peer grouped.Thus, the peer groups associated with the role mining graph to use forrole mining may be determined by accessing the peer groups previouslydetermined for the identity graph that are associated with the nodes ofthe role mining graph. If however, peer groups have not been determinedfor the available identity graph, the role mining graph (e.g., theentire available identity graph, the scoped identities subgraph, thescoped entitlement subgraph or some combination) may be peer grouped asdiscussed above based on the type of role mining to be performed. Forexample, the pruning and peer grouping of a role mining graph comprisinga scoped identities subgraph or a scoped entitlement subgraph can beaccomplished substantially as discussed to determine identitypeer-groups of the scoped identities or entitlement peer groups of thescoped entitlements.

These peer groups of identities or entitlements can then be used by forrole mining at step 960 by extracting the roles from these peer groups.For example, a set of entitlements may be extracted from each peer groupof identities determined for a role mining graph and the set ofentitlements extracted from each of these identity peer groups used todefine the determined roles. Similarly, in cases where the role mininggraph is a scoped entitlement subgraph of the identity graph, theentitlements of the role mining graph may be peer grouped substantiallyas discussed above, and each peer group of entitlements used as adetermined role.

Returning to step 920, in instances where a request for role mining andzero or more associated scoping attributes is received and there is noavailable identity graph (No branch of step 920) a role mining graph maybe determined from the identity management data and the type of rolemining to be performed.

In particular, at step 970 it can be determined if a scoping attributewas received with the received request. If there is no scoping attribute(NO branch of step 970), identity management data may be obtained atstep 980 and a role mining graph (e.g., identity graph, identitiessubgraph or entitlements subgraph) constructed as previously discussedat step 982. The type of graph constructed for use as a role mininggraph may be dependent on the type of role mining to be performed.

However, if a scoping attribute was received (Yes branch of step 970),scoped identity management data may be obtained at step 984 based on theattribute by searching the identity management data based on the scopingattribute to determine the identities of the identity management dataassociated with that scoping attribute (e.g., identities having thattitle, location, department, etc.) and the entitlements associated withthose determined identities determined.

Once this scoped set of identities and entitlements is determined, arole mining graph (e.g., an identity graph, identities subgraph orentitlements subgraph) may be generated from the scoped set ofidentities and entitlements at step 982, whereby a node of the graph iscreated for each scoped identity and entitlement, and weighted edges areconstructed between every pair of identity nodes that shares at leastone entitlement and between every pair of entitlement nodes that sharesat least one identity.

The pruning and peer grouping of the role mining graph constructed fromthe obtained identity management data (e.g., the identity graph,entitlement subgraph, identities subgraph) can then be accomplished atstep 986 substantially as discussed to determine peer-groups of theidentities or peer groups of the entitlements of the determined rolemining graph. The determined peer groups of identities or entitlementscan then be used for role mining depending on the type of role mining tobe accomplished at step 960.

Once the roles have been determined (e.g., the set of entitlementscomprising each of the mined roles), these mined roles may be presentedto the user through interface of the identity management system at step990. These roles may, for example, be assigned an identifier andpresented graphically in an interface with which the user may interactto determine additional or different data about the presented roles.

FIGS. 10-12 depict embodiments of these types of interfaces that may beutilized by embodiments of an identity management system as disclosedherein. Looking first at FIG. 10 , one embodiment of an interface for anidentity management system that may be utilized in association with rolemining is depicted. Here, the interface 1010 may include an area 1020that allows specification of a scoping attribute or other criteriaassociated with role mining. In the depicted example, the area 1020 mayallow a user selection of an identity peer group, a pruning threshold tobe used and a minimum role size. A graph display area 1030 may displaythe graphs or subgraphs of identity nodes and similarity relationshipsresulting from application of the attributes selected by the user inarea 1020.

Specifically, in one embodiment, when a user selects a particular peergroup in area 1020 the identity graph or identity management datamaintained by the identity management system may be scoped based on thepeer group selected by the user. An identities graph may be created bythe identity management system using the identities of the selected peergroup and edges between the identity nodes based on shared entitlementsas described. The edges of this identities graph can then be prunedaccording to the user selected pruning threshold in area 1020 and thepruned graph displayed in graph display area 1030.

Area 1040 can display a view of roles (here referred to as components)mined from the graph created and displayed in graph display area 1030.In one embodiment, once the identities graph is created, the identitymanagement system may perform role mining on the identities graph asdiscussed above. In particular, according to one embodiment, theidentity management system will determine each distinct subgraph of thedetermined identities graph, and for those subgraphs, determine which,if any, of those subgraphs includes a number of nodes greater than theminimum role size defined by the user in area 1020. The roles can thenbe mined from any of these determined subgraphs.

Area 1040 will then display an indicator for each of the subgraphs ofthe graph displayed in graph 1030 from which a role was mined. In oneembodiment, the role may be assigned an identifier and an icon (e.g.,circle) representing the role may be displayed along with the identifierfor the role in area 1040. The size of the icon may, for example, bereflective of the number of nodes or size of the subgraph from which theassociated role was mined.

In this example, a user has selected a peer group “wcP3054” and defineda pruning threshold of “0.6” and a minimum role size of 1 in area 1020.Thus, an identities graph may be generated by the identity managementsystem using the identities associated with the peer group “wcP3054”using a pruning threshold of 0.6 for the edges. This identities graph isdisplayed in graph display area 1030. Moreover, here there is onlysubgraph of the identities graph and it has a greater number of identitynodes than the minimum role size of 1 specified by the user. Thus, theidentities management system may perform role mining on this identitiesgraph, assign the identifier “C-18” to the mined role and display anicon 1042 in area labeled with the role identifier (“C-18”) with a sizereflective of the number of nodes of the identity graph represented ingraph display area 1030 from which the role was mined.

Moving to FIG. 11 , here, the user has selected the same peer group“wcP3054” and defined a pruning threshold of “0.8” and a minimum rolesize of 1 in area 1020. Thus, an identities graph may be generated bythe identity management system using the identities associated with thepeer group “wcP3054” using a pruning threshold of 0.8 for the edges.This identities graph is displayed in graph display area 1030. Here,however, as the edges have been pruned according to a higher pruningthreshold (e.g., 0.8) there are 6 subgraphs 1104 of the identities graphthat have a greater number of identity nodes than the minimum role sizeof 1 specified by the user. Thus, the identities management system mayperform role mining on each of these subgraphs 1104, assign identitiesto each of the mined roles and display an associated icon 1142 with theassigned label in area 1040, where the icon 1142 may have a sizereflective of the number of nodes in the associated subgraph. Here, forexample, icon 1142 a may be associated with subgraph 1104 a, icon 1142 bassociated with subgraph 1104 b, icon 1142 c associated with subgraph1104 c, etc.

Continuing with the same example, in FIG. 12 the user has selected thesame peer group “wcP3054” and defined a pruning threshold of “0.8.’However, here the user has defined a minimum role size of 10 in area1020. Thus, an identities graph may be generated by the identitymanagement system using the identities associated with the peer group“wcP3054” using a pruning threshold of 0.8 for the edges. Thisidentities graph is displayed in graph display area 1030. Here, as inFIG. 11 , there are 6 subgraphs 1204. However, as the user has defined aminimum role size of 10 in the example depicted in FIG. 12 , theidentities management system may only perform role mining on each ofthese subgraphs 1204 a, 1204 b that have more than 10 identity nodes.The identity management system can then assign identities to each of themined roles and display an associated icon 1242 with the assigned labelin area 1040, where the icon 1242 may have a size reflective of thenumber of nodes in the associated subgraph. Here, for example, icon 1242b may be associated with subgraph 1204 a and icon 1242 b associated withsubgraph 1204 b.

FIG. 13 depicts an embodiment of an interface that may be utilized by anidentity management system to display a distribution of entitlementswithin a particular role. Specifically, in the depicted embodiment, whena user selects a particular role (e.g., within an interface presented bythe identity management system), the user may be presented with aninterface such as that in FIG. 13 whereby a list of entitlements of therole and the distribution of those entitlements may be presented to auser in both a textual manner and through a visual depiction, such as ahistogram or the like.

FIG. 14 depicts another embodiment of an interface that may be utilizedby an identity management system to display data regarding determinedroles. Here, the interface may be a Sankey chart showing which roles(e.g., Role 6, Role 5 and Role 34) include certain attributes (e.g.,Engineering, Sales, Software Engineer, Data Scientist and ProductManager).

As can be seen then, according to embodiments of an identity managementsystem, an identity graph may include nodes representing roles, wherethose roles may be defined based on identity management data obtainedfrom an enterprise, roles defined by a user associated with anenterprise (e.g., using a role definition interface) or determined fromrole mining, or from another source altogether. It is thus desirable foridentity management systems to offer role assessment capabilitieswhereby roles comprising collections of entitlements may be ascertainedfrom the identity management data associated with enterprise and anassessment metric (also refer to as a score) for a set of these rolesmay be determined, where the metric is a reflection, for example, of thequality or health (used herein interchangeably) of the structure of theset of roles.

Accordingly, to ameliorate or address these issues, among other ends,embodiments of the identity management systems disclosed herein mayutilize a network graph approach to improve identity governance,including the assessment of roles associated with the identitymanagement data of an enterprise. Specifically, embodiments of identitymanagement systems as disclosed may provide role assessment based on anetwork graph that includes roles of an enterprise. Embodiments may thusgenerate a network identity (property) graph that includes nodes foridentities, entitlements, roles or other identity management artifactsof an enterprise. Such a network identity graph may be, or may include,a role graph having nodes representing roles associated with theenterprise and edges representing similarities between the roles (e.g.,represented by the nodes). These edges may comprise a similarity weightdetermined, based on, for example, shared entitlements between the rolesor by concurrent identities (e.g., a number of identities that sharethose roles).

Specifically, in many instances, in the context of an enterprise theremay be what are referred to as multi-dimensional roles. Amulti-dimensional role may be instances of similar roles that may varyslightly according to some criteria. For example, if an enterprise hasmany different locations, a role in one location may be very similar toa role in another location. Thus, administrators or others concernedwith identify governance within an enterprise, or compliance of anenterprise with identity management goals or requirements, may desire tovalidate or otherwise assess the role structure of an enterprise (orportions thereof) to determine the quality or health of these roles. Byassessing the health of the roles structure, such metrics may be usefulfor compliance purposes or to assist in optimizing the role structure ormore generally streamlining role management for the enterprise.

Moreover, by identifying roles that may be strongly similar or otherwiseclosely aligned, efficiencies with respect to management of these rolesmay be achieved. For example, in some cases, roles that have similarsets of entitlements may be consolidated (e.g., merged) or some of theroles eliminated. As another alternative, roles that share a similargroup of identities (e.g., where the same set of identities share a setof roles) may be bundled together and an overarching role (referred toas a portfolio role) may be defined such that the bundle of similarroles may be managed as a group using the portfolio role. Thus, usingembodiments, the actual scope of identities (e.g., a user population)for which roles can be consolidated to reduce use of resources in rolemanagement for that specific population and defining or assigning rolesfor that population. More generally, then, by reducing the number ofroles or the interactions with these roles, the number of both computingresources and man hours required for such identity governance may bereduced, along with the commensurate cost to the enterprise of suchidentity management.

In one embodiment, for example, a role graph may be an access role graphthat is a role graph modeled in terms of entitlement (e.g., access)similarities between all the roles. The edges of the access role graphrepresent an access similarity relationship between two roles (e.g.,nodes representing the roles) joined by the edge of the graph. A weightmay be computed for the access similarity relationship based on theentitlements shared between the two roles and the number of entitlementsthe roles include. Roles with similar entitlements or access patternsmay thus cluster close together on the access graph. Embodiments ofthese access role graphs may give high-level of abstractions on theoverall access model of an enterprise while accurately reflecting theglobal role (access) structure. As such, these access role graphs may beuseful, for example, as a “role provisioning Quality Assessment” toolindicating overall well-being of an enterprises role structure, inrecommending consolidation of redundant roles, or verifying how newroles may fit in the current access model.

As another embodiment, for example, a role graph may be an concurrencygraph that is modeled in terms of concurrent identities shared betweenroles. The edges of the concurrency graph represent an concurrencysimilarity relationship between two roles (e.g., nodes representing theroles) joined by the edge of the graph. A weight may be computed for theconcurrency similarity relationship based on the number of identitieswhich share those roles and the number of identities that have thoseroles. Roles with high concurrency with one another cluster closertogether on the concurrency graph. Moreover, the concurrency graph maybe filtered based on the number of supporting identities (e.g., thenumber of identities that include both roles). This support (alsoreferred to as the concurrent or concurrency count) thus determines thesignificance of the computed concurrency weights, by allowing theconcurrency graph to filter out highly concurrent roles that share onlyfew identities, thus rendering more meaningful representation of theconcurrency graph. As such, these concurrency graphs may be useful as a“role-profiling assistant” identifying concurrent patterns of peeraccess, simplifying business rules, or surfacing potential profiles fornew joiners. These concurrency graphs may also allow users to divedeeper and profile roles within units of an enterprise when applied withscoping of the concurrency graph.

Moreover, according to embodiments, various metrics may be determinedfor assessing the quality or health of the role structure of anenterprise based on an access role graph or a concurrency role graph.Specifically, optimal (e.g., ideal) network or graph topologies foraccess and concurrency graphs can be inferred. Graph based metrics maythus provide a starting point to standardize quality scoring for rolestructures and access models. In one embodiment, a combination of graphbased metrics may be utilized to measure a role graph structure withrespect to an ideal graph topology optimized for the enterprise. Such ascoring system allows personalization taking into account the trade-offbetween compliance-driven and enablement-driven governance strategies.Thus role data, including for example, visual depictions of role graphsfor the enterprise or quality assessment scores may be presented to auser through embodiments of the identity management systems as depictedherein.

Turning to FIG. 15 then, a distributed networked computer environmentincluding an identity management system with one embodiment of a roleassessor is depicted. As discussed above, the networked computerenvironment may include an enterprise computing environment 1500including a number of computing devices or applications that may becoupled over a computer network 1502 or combination of computernetworks. Enterprise environment 1500 may thus include a number ofresources, various resource groups and users associated with anenterprise. Users may have various roles, job functions,responsibilities, etc. to perform within various processes or tasksassociated with enterprise environment 1500.

To assist in managing the entitlements assigned to various users andmore generally in managing and assessing access risks in enterpriseenvironment 1500, an identity management system 1550 may be employed.Such an identity management system 1550 may allow an administrative orother type of user to define one or more identities and one or moreentitlements and associate these identities with entitlements using, forexample, an administrator interface 1552. Moreover, an identitymanagement system 1550 may allow such a user to define one or more rolesfor the enterprise, where these defined roles are defined as collectionsof access entitlements or access profiles and may be assigned toidentities through the identity management system 1550 based on specificrules of the enterprise in terms of the identity's attributes, theirexpected responsibilities within the organization, or other criteria.Identity management system 1550 or 1560 may also allow roles to be minedand defined in this manner. Identity management system 1550 may, in manyrespect, function similarly to other embodiments of identity managementsystems disclosed herein and such similar functionality will not bedescribed further for the sake of conciseness.

The identity management system 1550 may thus store identity managementdata 1554. The identity management data 1554 stored may include a set ofentries, each entry corresponding to and including an identity (e.g.,alphanumerical identifiers for identities) as defined and managed by theidentity management system, a list or vector of entitlements (e.g.,alphanumeric identifiers for entitlements) assigned to that identity bythe identity management system, a list or vector of enterprise rolesassigned to that identity, and a timestamp at which the identitymanagement data was collected from the identity management system. Theset of entries may also include entries corresponding to entitlementsand roles, where each entry for a role may include the role identifier(e.g., alphanumerical identifier or name for the role) and a list orvector of the entitlements associated with each role. Other data couldalso be associated with each role, such as a title, location ordepartment associated with the role.

Accordingly, graph generator 1564 may obtain identity management data1554 from one or more identity management systems 1550 associated withenterprise 1500. Graph generator 1564 may allow an identity graph orsubgraphs thereof to be generated from the obtained identity managementdata 1554 and stored in graph data store 1566. In one embodiment, aspart of a generated identity graph, or as separate graphs, graphgenerator may generate one or more role graphs.

Again, these role graphs may be subgraphs of an identity graph, or maybe separately generated and stored, by the graph generator 1564. In oneembodiment, for example, graph generator 1564 may generate an accessrole graph that is a role graph modeled in terms of entitlement (e.g.,access) similarities between all the roles. The edges of the access rolegraph represent an access similarity relationship between two roles(e.g., nodes representing the roles) joined by the edge of the accessrole graph. Thus, in one embodiment, an access role graph may begenerated from identity management data obtained from the enterprise.This access role graph may be, for example, be generated as part of anidentity graph and may be generated in association with such an identitygraph by graph generator 1564 (and may thus be a subgraph of such anidentity graph).

Specifically, in generating such an identity graph, each of the rolesfrom the most recently obtained identity management data may bedetermined and a node of the graph created for each role. An edge isconstructed between each role node (node representing a role) and eachentitlement node representing an entitlement included in that node,where that edge may represent a relationship that indicates the roleincludes that entitlement. An edge of the identity graph may also beconstructed between each identity node (node representing an identity)and each role node representing a role that has been assigned to thatidentity, where that edge may represent a relationship that indicatesthe identity has that role.

There may also be an edge constructed between role nodes that representsa relationship (referred to as an access similarity) between the rolesrepresented by the nodes based on the number of entitlements shared bythe roles represented by those nodes (e.g., where each of the role nodeshas an edge in the graph to the same entitlement node representing thateach role includes the entitlement represented by the entitlement node).A weight may be computed for the access similarity relationship based onthe entitlements shared between the two roles and the number ofentitlements each of the roles include.

Such a weight for an access similarity relationship may be generated torepresent a degree of similarity between the roles of the respectivenodes joined by that edge based on the number of shared entitlements. Inone embodiment, for example, using a proper similarity function (e.g.,Jaccard similarity). In one embodiment, the Jaccard similarity for anaccess relationship between two role nodes may be determined by theIntersection(entitlements of the two roles represented by the rolenodes)/Union(entitlements of the two roles represented by the rolenodes). In this manner then, a generated identity graph may include anaccess role graph that is a role graph modeled in terms of entitlement(e.g., access) similarities between the roles.

Similarly, there may be an edge constructed between role nodes thatrepresents a relationship (referred to as a concurrent similarity)between the roles represented by the nodes based on the number ofidentities that shared by the roles (e.g., concurrent identities)represented by those nodes (e.g., where each of the role nodes has anedge in the graph to the same identity node representing that theidentity includes that role). A weight may be computed for theconcurrent similarity relationship based on the identities sharedbetween the two roles and the number of identities having each of theroles.

Such a weight for a concurrent similarity relationship may be generatedto represent a degree of similarity between the roles of the respectivenodes joined by that edge based on the number of shared identities. Forexample, a weight for a concurrent similarity relationship may begenerated using a proper similarity function (e.g., Jaccard similarity).In one embodiment, the Jaccard similarity for a concurrent similarityrelationship between two role nodes may be determined as theIntersection(identities having both roles)/Union(identities that haveeither of the roles). In this manner then, a generated identity graphmay include a concurrency role graph that is a role graph that modeledin terms of concurrent identities shared between roles. It will thus benoted that a generated identity graph may include a role graph (e.g., asa subgraph of the identity graph), where that role graph may include oneof, or both of, an access role graph and a concurrency role graph.

As noted, a user may interact with the identity management system 1550through a user interface 1558 to access or manipulate data onidentities, entitlements, events, roles or generally perform identitymanagement with respect to enterprise environment 1500. As but oneexample, as the roles, entitlements and identities of an enterpriseevolve they may stray in substantial and detrimental ways from an idealstate, or other identity governance desires, of the enterprise. Users ofan identity management system may thus wish to determine a currentdata-driven assessment of the current role structure for theirenterprise.

Specifically, in many instances, in the context of an enterprise 1500there may be what are referred to as multi-dimensional roles. Amulti-dimensional role may be instances of similar roles that may varyslightly according to some criteria. For example, if an enterprise hasmany different locations, a role in one location (e.g., a softwaredeveloper role in Austin, Tex.) may be very similar to a role in anotherlocation (a role for a software developer in San Jose, Calif.). In otherwords, a software developer in either location may require access to asubstantially similar set of entitlements, however, since the creatorsof such roles (which may be, for example, in those two differentlocations) may have no visibility or access into the roles structure ofthe enterprise generally, two (or more) different roles may be created,despite the fact that these roles may be substantially similar (e.g.,comprise similar entitlements) or, in certain cases, may even be thesame. Thus, administrators or others concerned with identify governancewithin an enterprise, or compliance of an enterprise with identitymanagement goals or requirements, may desire to validate or otherwiseassess the role structure of an enterprise (or portions thereof) toascertain, or determine the quality or health of the roles of anenterprise.

Likewise, by identifying roles that may be strongly similar or otherwiseclosely aligned, efficiencies with respect to management of these rolesmay be achieved. For example, in some cases, roles that have similarsets of entitlements may be consolidated (e.g., merged) or some of theroles eliminated. As another alternative, roles that share a similargroup of identities (e.g., where the same set of identities share a setof roles) may be bundled together and an overarching role (referred toas a portfolio role) may be defined such that the bundle of similarroles may be manage as a group using the portfolio role. Thus, usingembodiments, the actual scope of identities (e.g., a user population)for which roles can be consolidated to reduce use of resources in rolemanagement for that specific population and defining or assigning rolesfor that population. More generally, then, by reducing the number ofroles or the interactions with these roles, the number of both computingresources and man hours required for such identity governance may bereduced, along with the commensurate cost to the enterprise of suchidentity management.

Accordingly, is desirable for identity management solutions to offerrole assessment capabilities whereby roles comprising collections ofentitlements may be ascertained from the identity management dataassociated with enterprise 1500. Embodiments of identity managementsystem 1550 may thus provide a role validation tool through the userinterface 1558 or interface 1568. In this manner, a user may bepresented with the ability to perform role validation through the userinterface 1558 (or interface 1568), along with an optional attribute orcriteria to scope the set of roles for validation. One or moreinterfaces with the results of the role validation can then bedetermined and presented to the user through the role validation tool ofuser interface 1558 (or interface 1568). Such interfaces may include anassessment metric (also refer to as a score) for the set of these roles,where the metric is a reflection, for example, of the quality or healthof the structure of the set of roles. By assessing the health of theroles structure, such metrics may be useful for compliance purposes orto assist in optimizing the role structure or more generallystreamlining role management for the enterprise.

To provide such a role validation or assessment tool, identitymanagement system 1560 may include role assessor 1590. Role assessor1590 may include an interface 1592. Interfaces 1568 of the identitymanagement system 1560 or interface 1558 may present one or moreinterfaces which may be used to access risk assessment, including thevalidation of roles based on an identity graph in the graph data store1566 or subgraphs thereof. When a request for role assessment isreceived from the user through the user interface 1558 (or interface1568), a request to perform role assessment can be submitted to the roleassessor 1590 from the identity management system 1550 (e.g., or userinterface 1558 or other component of identity management system 1550)through the interface 1592, where the request may include, for example,an identification of a type of role graph to use (e.g., an access rolegraph or a concurrency role graph) and zero or more other criteria orattributes to utilize when determining a graph or subgraph to utilizewhen performing role assessment. These criteria may include, forexample, zero or more scoping attributes that may have been provided bythe user through the user interface or zero or more thresholds (e.g., apruning threshold or concurrency count (support) threshold or the like)that may have been provided by the user through the user interface. Notehere, that while the identity management system 1550 has been depictedin the diagram as separate and distinct from the identity managementsystem 1560 and coupled to identity management system 1560 over acomputer network 1504, it will be realized that such an identitymanagement system 1550 and identity management system 1560 may bedeployed as part of the same identity management system or differentidentity management system, as a cloud based application or set ofservices, or in another configuration entirely.

As such, when a request for role validation and the zero or moreassociate scoping (or other) attributes are received through the roleassessor interface 1592, the role assessor 1590 may preform roleassessment and generate a health metric as discussed. In particular, inone embodiment, the role assessor 1590 may determine a role graph toutilize for role validation based on the identification of the type ofrole graph to utilize received in the request along with the zero ormore scoping attributes received in the request. Specifically, the roleassessor 1590 may query or otherwise access the graph data store 1566 toobtain the specified type of role graph

As an example, if an access role graph is specified in the request therole assessor 1590 may query the graph data store 1566 to obtain theaccess role graph comprising roles nodes and access similarityrelationships between those role nodes (e.g., and which may include theentitlement nodes or identity nodes and edges associated with those rolenodes or access similarity relationships). If there are any scopingattributes, the set of role nodes of the obtained access role graph maybe further scoped by those scoping attributes such that the access rolegraph only includes role nodes having (or not having) such attributes).For example, it may be desired to scope the role nodes for only rolesassociated with certain locations or departments such that the accessrole graph for which role assessment is performed only includes rolenodes from those locations or departments.

Specifically, in one embodiment a scoped access role (sub)graphassociated with a scoping attribute may be determined from an identitygraph by querying the identity graph in the graph data store 1566 basedon the scoping attribute to find the role (or other) nodes and edgesassociated with the scoping attribute. Such querying may involve, forexample, querying the identity graph to determine the role nodes of thegraph associated with the scoping attribute and determining theentitlement and identity nodes and edges along any path of the identitygraph originating with each of those scoped role nodes.

Similarly, if a concurrency role graph is specified in the request therole assessor 1590 may query the graph data store 1566 to obtain theconcurrency role graph comprising roles nodes and concurrent similarityrelationships between those role nodes (e.g., and which may include theentitlement nodes or identity nodes and edges associated with those rolenodes or concurrent similarity relationships). If there are any scopingattributes, the set of role nodes of the obtained concurrent role graphmay be further scoped by those scoping attributes such that the accessrole graph only includes role nodes having (or not having) suchattributes).

It will be realized, that in some embodiments, even if one type of rolegraph or the other has been specified in a request received from theuser it may be useful to obtain both types of role graphs (e.g., bothaccess and concurrent role graphs) at the time the graph data store 1566is queried, as both types of role graphs may be utilized in someembodiments to compute a health metric for the set of (e.g., scopedroles). Moreover, it may also be a relatively similar query to obtainboth types of role graphs in the same query as each type of role graphmay include the same or similar role nodes and may differ only in a typeof relationship (e.g., access similarity or concurrent similarity)between those role nodes.

Once the role graph to utilize for role validation has been obtained(e.g., concurrent role graph, access role graph or both), the obtainedrole graph may be pruned according to any pruning threshold received.This pruning may remove any edges between roles associated with therequested role graph type whose similarity weight may fall below thepruning threshold. Specifically, in certain embodiments, if an accessrole graph has been specified in the request all access similarityrelationships between role nodes whose similarity weight falls below thepruning threshold may be removed from the obtained role graph duringpruning, while if a concurrency role graph has been specified allconcurrent similarity relationships whose similarity weight falls belowthe pruning threshold may be removed from obtained role graph duringpruning. Thus, by pruning an access role graph all access similarityrelationship edges whose weight falls below the pruning threshold may beremoved from the role graph while by pruning a concurrency role graphany concurrent similarity relationship edges whose weight falls belowthe pruning threshold may be removed from the role graph.

Additionally, when pruning a concurrency role graph and concurrentsimilarity relationship edges whose support falls below any give supportthreshold (also known as a concurrent or concurrency threshold) may alsobe removed. As discussed, this support may be defined as theintersection of identities that are shared between two roles and thusthat is used to define the weight of a concurrent similarityrelationship between two role nodes. However, highly concurrent rolesmay only share a few identities, and thus are particularlyrepresentative of particular (e.g., risky) significance. Thus, byfiltering out (e.g., highly) concurrent roles that share only a fewidentities, the resulting concurrency role graph may be made moremeaningful or representative of roles of interest.

Once the role graph to utilize has been obtained, it can be presented tothe user through the user interface 1558 or interface 1568 in responseto the originally received request. Additionally, one or more healthmetrics reflective of the quality of the role structure of access modelsof the enterprise (or the portions of the enterprise represented in theobtained role graph) may be determined and presented to the user aswell. One metric may be related to a population coverage. Specifically,a metric may be determined based on the relative or absolute number ofidentities associated with each role (or roles not originally assignedto the identity, or identities not assigned to the role, at the time ofcreation of the role or identity). Roles with too large of a coverage ofidentities may indicate poor access management.

In some embodiments, metrics used in graph theory may provide a startingpoint to standardize quality scoring for these role structures andaccess models. In one embodiment, when generating a score based on anaccess role graph, a difference between a theoretically best graphstructure for role structure within an enterprise may be used as abaseline to generate such metrics. For example, it may be understoodthat the more cliques in an access role graph, the harder it may be foran enterprise to manage its role structure.

To illustrate, brief reference is made to FIG. 16 , wherein a set ofexample access role graphs are presented. It will be noted that atheoretically worse access role graph for a role structure may bethought of as a clique as represented in graph 1604, where every role isrelated (e.g., by an access similarity relationship) to every other rolesuch that in a role graph representing such a structure there would beorder n² edges in the graph 1604. Conversely, a theoretically bestaccess role graph for a role structure may be thought of as a set ofunrelated role nodes (e.g., all singletons) as represented in graph1602, where every role is unrelated (e.g., by an access similarityrelationship) to every other role such that in an access role graphrepresenting such a structure there would be 0 edges in the graph 1602.

Returning to FIG. 15 , thus, a score may be determined using an accessrole graph based on the number of edges in the determine access rolegraph relative to either 0 edges or n² edges. In this manner, the metricdetermined would be reflective of the access role structure in relationto a theoretically perfect (or worse) access role structure. Such ametric may be referred to as an access (density) ratio.

This access (density) ratio may be a scaling metric that measures thedeviation from an optimal structure of an access role graphs; rangingbetween the worst-case access “containing high magnitude of clique(pseudo-clique) structures” (e.g. clique with similarity >70%) to thebest-case access “approaching an edgeless (graph) structure” (e.g., howfar off of achieving optimal structure above certain pruning threshold,like 70%). This access ratio may thus be determined based on an order(e.g., O) of the number of edges vs number of (role) nodes scaling alongO(n) vs O(n²) across entire access role graph

Similarly, for a concurrency role graph, a concurrency (density) ratiomay be determined as a health metric. Such a concurrency (density) ratiomay be a scaling that measures the deviation from optimal structure ofconcurrency graphs taking into account the support (intersection ofidentities); ranging between worst-case (e.g. a clique or a dense enoughgraph) to best-case “edgeless singletons.” The determination of such ametric may be substantially similar to the determination of an accessratio as discussed. However, in some cases to determine such aconcurrency ratio the edges (e.g., concurrent similarity edges) may befiltered or weighted by a support threshold (e.g., both in cases wherethey are, or are not, pruned in the determination of the concurrencygraph).

Other metrics, or combinations or metrics, may be determined withoutloss of generality. For example, a combination of an access ratio andconcurrency ratio may be determined where these ratios may be weighted,balanced, mixed, averaged or combined in some other manner to determineone or more scores reflecting overall well-being (health) of accessgovernance. Thus, a determined metric may be presented in associationwith a role graph (an access role graph or concurrency role graph, orboth) through the user interface 1558 or interface 1568 in response tothe originally received request, where the presented metric may havebeen determined based on the presented role graph.

Users associated with an enterprise could thus utilize such a rolevalidation or access awareness interface to evaluate and validate theirexisting role structure to explore hierarchical relationships betweenexisting roles; profile, re-provision, or label (e.g., tag) highlysimilar existing roles, consolidate and label existing roles that areheavily concurrent within certain populations, or evaluate the health ofan entire (or portion of) a role structure based on the scoring systemor visual depiction of a role graph.

Similarly, users involved in active access modeling or governanceprocess (e.g., using role mining capabilities) could utilize the rolevalidation or access awareness interface for decisions related toprioritizing roles based on the novelty with respect to existing roles,provisioning newly discovered roles with significantly high contrast toexisting roles, merging, profiling, or labeling highly similar existingroles, enhancing access interpretability and enabling detection ofpotential risk based on security policies or, validating the impact ofprovisioned roles under a current role structure.

In one embodiment, such an interface may allow a user to effectivelyevaluate the effect of the removal of one or more roles from, oraddition of one or more roles to, their existing role structure.Specifically, a role validation tool presented through the userinterface 1558 or interface 1568 may allow a user to add (or remove) aspecific role from a set of roles (e.g., roles associated with apresented role graph and health metric). The role assessor 1590 can thendetermine or update the role graph (e.g., the access role graph orconcurrency role graph, or both) based on the addition (or removal) ofthis role and determine an update health metric based on the updatedrole graph. This updated graph and updated role health metric may bepresented to the user through the interface 1558 or interface 1568. Suchan updated role graph and health metric may be presented, for example,alongside the originally presented role graph and health metric so auser may ascertain the effect of the addition (or removal) of that roleboth visually through the difference in the graph structures presented,and quantitatively through the difference in the health scorespresented.

Moreover, such an interface may allow present a user withrecommendations (e.g., a risk amelioration recommendation) regardingmodifications to an existing role structure. For example, role assessor1590 may perform clustering on a determined role graph (e.g., aconcurrency role graph) to cluster the role nodes of such a role graph.Such clustering may be accomplished as discussed elsewhere herein.Cliques or pseudo-cliques of roles determined from such clustering maythen be determined and presented to users through the interface 1558 or1568 for the user to consider consolidation of such roles. In the caseof clustering of a concurrency role graph, it may be recommended todefine a portfolio role that includes all the roles of an identifiedclique or pseudo-clique such that the portfolio role may be assigned tothe identities that have been granted the roles comprising that cliqueor pseudo-clique. In that way, roles that share a similar group ofidentities (e.g., where the same set of identities share a set of roles)may be bundled together and an overarching role (referred to as aportfolio role) may be defined such that the bundle of similar roles maybe manage as a group using the portfolio role. Thus, using embodiments,the actual scope of identities (e.g., a user population) for which rolescan be consolidated to reduce use of resources in role management forthat specific population and defining or assigning roles for thatpopulation. More generally, then, by reducing the number of roles or theinteractions with these roles, the number of both computing resourcesand man hours required for such identity governance may be reduced,along with the commensurate cost to the enterprise of such identitymanagement.

It may be helpful to an understanding of embodiments to briefly discussan example role graph. Looking then at FIG. 17 , a graphical depictionof an identity graph 1700 (or portion thereof) that includes an examplerole graph (or portion thereof) is depicted. Here, nodes are representedby circles and relationships are represented by the directional arrowsbetween the nodes. Such a role graph 1700 may represent roles,identities or entitlements, their association, and the degree of accesssimilarity or concurrent similarity (or both) between roles representedby the role nodes. Thus, for example, role nodes 1708 a, 1708 b have thelabel “Role” indicating they are role nodes. Role nodes 1708 a, 1708 bare associated with a set of properties that define the attributes ordata of that role node 1708 a, 1708 b, including here that the “id” ofrole node 1708 a is “Role_4562” and the “id” of role node 1708 b is“Role_3128”.

Similarly identity nodes 1702 a, 1702 b, 1702 c have the label“Identity” indicating they are identity nodes. Identity nodes 1702 a,1702 b, 1702 c are associated with a set of properties that define theattributes or data of that identity node. For example, identity node1702 a is shown as being associated with a set of properties that definethe attributes or data of that identity node 1702 a, including here thatthe “id” of identity node 1702 a is “a123”, the “company” of identitynode 1702 a is “Ajax”, the “dept” of identity node 1702 a is“Engineering”, the “title” of identity node 1702 a is “Developer, andthe “location” of identity node 1702 a is “Austin”.

Entitlement nodes 1704 a, 1704 b, 1704 c, 1704 d have the label“Entitlement” indicating that they are entitlement nodes. Entitlementnodes 1704 a, 1704 b, 1704 c, 1704 d are associated with a set ofproperties that define the attributes or data of that entitlement node.For example, entitlement node 1704 b is shown as being associated with aset of properties that define the attributes or data of that entitlementnode 1704 b, including here that the “id” of entitlement node 1704 b is“ad179”, and the “source” of entitlement node 1704 b is “ActiveDirectory”. Entitlement node 1704 a is shown as being associated with aset of properties that define the attributes or data of that entitlementnode 1704 a, including here that the “id” of entitlement node 1704 a is“ok143”, and the “source” of entitlement node 1704 a is “Okta”.

Identity nodes 1702 and role nodes 1708 of the identity graph can bejoined by edges formed by directed relationships 1716. Directedrelationships 1716 may represent that the identity of identity node 1702has (represented by the labeled “HAS_ROLE” relationships 1716) the rolerepresented by the role nodes 1708. For example, HAS_ROLE relationship1716 a represents that the identity represented by identity node 1702 ahas been assigned the role represented by role node 1708 a. Similarly,HAS_ROLE relationship 1716 b represents that the identity represented byidentity node 1702 b has been assigned the role represented by role node1708 a, HAS_ROLE relationship 1716 c represents that the identityrepresented by identity node 1702 b has been assigned the rolerepresented by role node 1708 b, and HAS_ROLE relationship 1716 drepresents that the identity represented by identity node 1702 c hasbeen assigned the role represented by role node 1708 b.

Entitlement nodes 1704 and role nodes 1708 of the identity graph can bejoined by edges formed by directed relationships 1714. Directedrelationships 1714 may represent that the role of a role node 1708includes (represented by the labeled “HAS_ENT” relationships 1714) theentitlement of the related entitlement node 1704. For example, HAS_ENTrelationship 1714 a represents that the role represented by role node1708 a includes the entitlement represented by entitlement node 1704 a.Similarly, HAS_ENT relationship 1714 b represents that the rolerepresented by role node 1708 a includes the entitlement represented byentitlement node 1704 b, HAS_ENT relationship 1714 c represents that therole represented by role node 1708 b includes the entitlementrepresented by entitlement node 1704 b, HAS_ENT relationship 1714 drepresents that the role represented by role node 1708 b includes theentitlement represented by entitlement node 1704 c and HAS_ENTrelationship 1714 e represents that the role represented by role node1708 b includes the entitlement represented by entitlement node 1704 d.

The role nodes 1708 of the identity graph may be joined by edges formedby concurrent similarity relationships 1722. Concurrent similarityrelationships 1722 may represent that the role of one role node 1708 issimilar to (represented by the labeled “CONCURRENT_SIM” relationship1722) the role of the related role node 1708 based on shared identitieswhich have that role. A weight may be computed for the concurrentsimilarity relationship 1722 the number of identities nodes 1702 whichshare those roles (e.g., which have HAS_ROLE relationships 1716 withboth roles nodes 1708) and the number of identities that have thoseroles (e.g., the number of identity nodes 1702 that have HAS_ROLErelationships 1716 with either of the roles nodes 1708). In oneembodiment, concurrent similarity relationship 1722 between role nodes1708 a, 1708 b may be determined as the Intersection(number ofidentities nodes 1702 having roles 1708)/Union(number of identitiesnodes 1702 having either of the roles 1708). For example, here,CONCURRENT_SIM relationship 1722 may have a weight of 0.33 assigned toit.

The role nodes 1708 of the identity graph may also be joined by edgesformed by access similarity relationships 1724. Access similarityrelationships 1724 may represent that the role of one role node 1708 issimilar to (represented by the labeled “ACCESS_SIM” relationship 1724)the role of the related role node 1708 based on entitlements that thoseroles share. A weight may be computed for the access similarityrelationship 1724 based on the number of entitlement nodes 1704 sharedby those roles 1708 (e.g., which have a HAS_ENT relationships 1714 withboth roles nodes 1708) and the number of entitlements that those roleshave (e.g., the number of entailment nodes 1704 with which either ofthose role nodes 1708 has a HAS_ENT relationships 1714). In oneembodiment, access similarity relationship 1724 between role nodes 1708a, 1708 b may be determined as the Intersection(number of entitlementnodes 1704 having relationships with both roles nodes 1708)/Union(numberof entitlement nodes 1704 having relationships with either roles node1708). For example, here, ACCESS_SIM relationship 1724 may have a weightof 0.25 assigned to it. Note that both these types of similarityrelationships 1722, 1724 may be a single bidirectional relationshipassigned a single similarity weight or may be bidirectionalrelationships that may be weighted differently based on differentcriteria.

As can be seen then, an identity graph may include a role graph thatincludes both an access role graph modeled in terms of entitlement(e.g., access) similarities between roles and a concurrency graph thatis modeled in terms of identities shared between roles. In the accessrole graph, certain edges (e.g., ACCESS_SIM relationships 1724)represent an access similarity relationship between two roles (e.g.,nodes representing the roles) joined by that edge of the graph, wherethe access similarity relationship may have a weight based on theentitlements shared between the roles and the number of entitlements theroles include. In the concurrency role graph, the edges (e.g.,CONCURRENT_SIM relationships 1722) represent a concurrent similaritymodeled in terms of shared identities shared between the roles. A weightmay be computed for the concurrent similarity relationship based on thenumber of identities which share those roles and the number ofidentities that have those roles.

With examples of such an access role graph or concurrency role graph inmind, reference is now made to FIG. 18 where a flow diagram of oneembodiment of a method for performing role assessment is depicted.Embodiments of such a method may be performed, for example by anidentity management system or a role assessor of such an identitymanagement system. Initially, a request to perform role assessment maybe received (STEP 1810). The request may include, for example, anidentification of a type of role graph to use (e.g., an access rolegraph or a concurrency role graph) and zero or more other criteria orattributes to utilize when determining a graph or subgraph to utilizewhen performing role assessment. These criteria may include, forexample, zero or more scoping attributes that may have been provided bythe user through the user interface or zero or more thresholds (e.g., apruning threshold or count (support) threshold or the like) that mayhave been provided by the user through the user interface.

In particular, in one embodiment, a role graph to utilize for rolevalidation may be determined based on the identification of the type ofrole graph to utilize received in the request along with the zero ormore scoping attributes received in the request (STEP 1820).Specifically, the graph may be queried to obtain the specified type ofrole graph

As an example, if an access role graph is specified in the request thegraph may be queried to obtain the access role graph comprising rolesnodes and access similarity relationships between those role nodes(e.g., and which may include the entitlement nodes or identity nodes andedges associated with those role nodes or access similarityrelationships). If there are any scoping attributes, the set of rolenodes of the obtained access role graph may be further scoped by thosescoping attributes such that the access role graph only includes rolenodes having (or not having) such attributes). For example, it may bedesired to scope the role nodes for only roles associated with certainlocations or departments such that the access role graph for which roleassessment is performed only includes role nodes from those locations ordepartments.

Specifically, in one embodiment a scoped access role (sub)graphassociated with a scoping attribute may be determined from an identitygraph by querying the identity graph based on the scoping attribute tofind the role (or other) nodes and edges associated with the scopingattribute. Such querying may involve, for example, querying the identitygraph to determine the role nodes of the graph associated with thescoping attribute and determining the entitlement and identity nodes andedges along any path of the identity graph originating with each ofthose scoped role nodes.

Similarly, if a concurrency role graph is specified in the request thegraph may be queried to obtain the concurrency role graph comprisingroles nodes and concurrent similarity relationships between those rolenodes (e.g., and which may include the entitlement nodes or identitynodes and edges associated with those role nodes or concurrentsimilarity relationships). If there are any scoping attributes, the setof role nodes of the obtained concurrent role graph may be furtherscoped by those scoping attributes such that the concurrent role graphonly includes role nodes having (or not having) such attributes). Insome embodiments, even if one type of role graph or the other has beenspecified in a request received from the user it may be useful to obtainboth types of role graphs (e.g., both access and concurrent role graphs)at the time the graph is queried, as both types of role graphs may beutilized in some embodiments to compute a health metric for the set of(e.g., scoped roles).

Once the role graph to utilize for role validation has been obtained(e.g., concurrent role graph, access role graph or both), the obtainedrole graph may be pruned according to any pruning threshold received(STEP 1830). This pruning may remove any edges associated with therequested role graph type whose similarity weight may fall below thepruning threshold. Specifically, in certain embodiments, if an accessrole graph has been specified in the request all access similarityrelationships between role nodes whose similarity weight falls below thepruning threshold may be removed from the obtained role graph duringpruning, while if a concurrency role graph has been specified allconcurrent similarity relationships whose similarity weight falls belowthe pruning threshold may be removed from obtained role graph duringpruning.

Additionally, when pruning a concurrency role graph and concurrentsimilarity relationship edges whose support falls below any give supportthreshold may also be removed. As discussed, this support may be definedas the intersection of identities that are shared between two roles andthus that is used to define the weight of a concurrent similarityrelationship between two role nodes. However, that highly concurrentroles may only share a few identities, and thus are particularlyrepresentative or of particular (e.g., risky) significance. Thus, byfiltering out (e.g., highly) concurrent roles that share only a fewidentities, the resulting concurrency role graph may be made moremeaningful or representative of roles of interest.

Once the role graph to utilize has been obtained, it can be used topresent role data (e.g., including the role graph) to the user through auser interface in response to the originally received request (STEP1850). Additionally, in some embodiments, one or more health metricsreflective of the quality of the role structure of access models of theenterprise (or the portions of the enterprise redefected in the obtainedrole graph) may be determined (STEP 1840) and presented to the user aspart of the represented ole data (STEP 1850). Such health metrics, mayfor example, be determined on the structure of the role graph. One suchhealth metric may be related to a population coverage. Specifically, ametric may be determined based on the relative or absolute number ofidentities associated with each role (or roles not originally assignedto the identity, or identities not assigned to the role, at the time ofcreation of the role or identity). Roles with too large of a coverage ofidentities may indicate poor access management.

In one embodiment, when generating a score based on an access rolegraph, a difference between a theoretically best graph structure forrole structure within an enterprise may be used as a baseline togenerate such metrics. For example, it may be understood that the morecliques in an access role graph, the harder it may be for an enterpriseto manage its role structure. Thus, a score may be determined using anaccess role graph based on the number of edges in the determine accessrole graph relative to either 0 edges or n² edges. In this manner, themetric determined would be reflective of the access role structure inrelation to a theoretically perfect (or worse) access role structure.Such a metric may be referred to as an access (density) ratio.Similarly, for a concurrency role graph, a concurrency (density) ratiomay be determined as a health metric. Such a concurrency (density) ratiomay be a scaling that measures the deviation from optimal structure ofconcurrency graphs taking into account the support (intersection ofidentities); ranging between worst-case (e.g. a clique or a dense enoughgraph) to best-case “edgeless singletons.” In some cases to determinesuch a concurrency ratio, the edges (e.g., concurrent similarity edges)may be filtered or weighted by a support threshold (e.g., both in caseswhere they are, or are not, pruned in the determination of theconcurrency graph).

Other metrics, or combinations or metrics, may be determined withoutloss of generality. For example, a combination of an access ratio andconcurrency ratio may be determined where these ratios may be weighted,balanced, mixed, averaged or combined in some other manner to determineone or more scores reflecting overall well-being (health) of accessgovernance. Thus, a determined metric may be presented in associationwith a role graph through the user interface in response to theoriginally received request, where the presented metric may have beendetermined based on the presented role graph (STEP 1850).

Users associated with an could thus utilize such a role validation oraccess awareness interface to evaluate and validate their existing rolestructure to explore hierarchical relationships between existing roles;profile, re-provision, or label (e.g., tag) highly similar existingroles, consolidate and label existing roles that are heavily concurrentwithin certain populations, or evaluate the health of an entire (orportion of) a role structure based on the scoring system or visualdepiction of a role graph.

Similarly, users involved in active access modeling or governanceprocess (e.g., using role mining capabilities) could utilize the rolevalidation or access awareness interface for decisions related toprioritizing roles based on the novelty with respect to existing roles,provisioning newly discovered roles with significantly high contrast toexisting roles, merging, profiling, or labeling highly similar existingroles, enhancing access interpretability and enabling detection ofpotential risk based on security policies or validating the impact ofprovisioned roles under a current role structure.

In one embodiment, such an interface may allow a user to effectivelyevaluate the effect of the removal of one or more roles from, oraddition of one or more roles to, their existing role structure.Specifically, a role validation interface presented through the userinterface may allow a user to add (or remove) a specific role from a setof roles (e.g., roles associated with a presented role graph and healthmetric). The role graph (e.g., the access role graph or concurrency rolegraph, or both) may be updated based on the addition (or removal) ofthis role and determine an updated health metric based on the updatedrole graph. This updated graph and updated role health metric may bepresented to the user through the interface. Such an updated role graphand health metric may be presented, for example, alongside theoriginally presented role graph and health metric so a user mayascertain the effect of the addition (or removal) of that role bothvisually through the difference in the graph structures presented, andquantitatively through the difference in the health scores presented.

Moreover, such an interface may allow present a user withrecommendations regarding modifications to an existing role structure.For example, it may be recommended to define a portfolio role thatincludes a set of roles within a presented graph such that the portfoliorole may be assigned to the identities that have been granted the rolescomprising that set of roles. In that way, roles that share a similargroup of identities (e.g., where the same set of identities share a setof roles) may be bundled together and an overarching role (referred toas a portfolio role) may be defined such that the bundle of similarroles may be managed as a group using the portfolio role. Thus, usingembodiments, the actual scope of identities (e.g., a user population)for which roles can be consolidated to reduce use of resources in rolemanagement for that specific population and defining or assigning rolesfor that population. More generally, then, by reducing the number ofroles or the interactions with these roles, the number of both computingresources and man hours required for such identity governance may bereduced, along with the commensurate cost to the enterprise of suchidentity management.

Certain example interfaces that may be used for roles assessment inembodiments of an identity management system are depicted in FIGS. 19A,19B, 19C and 19D. Looking first at FIG. 19A, one embodiment of aninterface for role assessment is presented. The user may utilizeinterface 1900 to role graph selection portion 1902 of the interface toselect whether a concurrency role graph or an access role graph isdesired (here two tabs associated with each type of role graph). In theexample depicted, the user has selected an access role graph for roleassessment. The user may also be presented with a threshold selectionportion 1904 of the interface (in this case a slider bar), where theuser may select a pruning threshold to utilize for pruning the (e.g.,similarity relationships) of the role graph to be determined andpresented in the interface 1900. In this case, as the role graph will bean access role graph, the threshold selection portion presents athreshold selection portion 1904 for an access similarity relationshipsimilarity threshold. An access role graph generated based on the user'sselection may then be presented in the interface 1900 where the pointspresented represent the role nodes of the graph and the edges representthe access similarity relationships between those roles (e.g., where theweights on those access similarity relationships are all at or above theselected pruning threshold). Other visual indicators may also be usedwith respect to the presented graph. For example, the size of a pointfor a role node may reflect the number of identities having that role.FIG. 19B depicts another embodiment of an interface for role assessmentwhere an access role graph is being presented.

Turning now to FIG. 19C, one embodiment of an interface for roleassessment is presented where the user has utilized role graph selectionportion 1902 interface 1900 to select that a concurrency role graph isdesired. Now, threshold selection portion 1904 of the interface 1900 maypresent selection mechanisms for a concurrency similarity relationshipsimilarity threshold and a concurrent count (support) threshold. Aconcurrency role graph generated based on the user's selection may thenbe presented in the interface 1900 where the points presented representthe role nodes of the graph and the edges represent the concurrencysimilarity relationships between those roles (e.g., where the weights onthose concurrency similarity relationships are all at or above theselected pruning threshold and have at least the selected concurrentcount). Other visual indicators may also be used with respect to thepresented graph. For example, the thickness of an edge may reflect thenumber of identities shared between the two roles (e.g., thicker linesindicate more identities shared between the roles). FIG. 19D depictsanother embodiment of an interface for role assessment where aconcurrency role graph is being presented.

Those skilled in the relevant art will appreciate that the invention canbe implemented or practiced with other computer system configurationsincluding, without limitation, multi-processor systems, network devices,mini-computers, mainframe computers, data processors, and the like.Embodiments can be employed in distributed computing environments, wheretasks or modules are performed by remote processing devices, which arelinked through a communications network such as a LAN, WAN, and/or theInternet. In a distributed computing environment, program modules orsubroutines may be located in both local and remote memory storagedevices. These program modules or subroutines may, for example, bestored or distributed on computer-readable media, including magnetic andoptically readable and removable computer discs, stored as firmware inchips, as well as distributed electronically over the Internet or overother networks (including wireless networks). Example chips may includeElectrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) chips.Embodiments discussed herein can be implemented in suitable instructionsthat may reside on a non-transitory computer readable medium, hardwarecircuitry or the like, or any combination and that may be translatableby one or more server machines. Examples of a non-transitory computerreadable medium are provided below in this disclosure.

Although the invention has been described with respect to specificembodiments thereof, these embodiments are merely illustrative, and notrestrictive of the invention. Rather, the description is intended todescribe illustrative embodiments, features and functions in order toprovide a person of ordinary skill in the art context to understand theinvention without limiting the invention to any particularly describedembodiment, feature or function, including any such embodiment featureor function described. While specific embodiments of, and examples for,the invention are described herein for illustrative purposes only,various equivalent modifications are possible within the spirit andscope of the invention, as those skilled in the relevant art willrecognize and appreciate.

As indicated, these modifications may be made to the invention in lightof the foregoing description of illustrated embodiments of the inventionand are to be included within the spirit and scope of the invention.Thus, while the invention has been described herein with reference toparticular embodiments thereof, a latitude of modification, variouschanges and substitutions are intended in the foregoing disclosures, andit will be appreciated that in some instances some features ofembodiments of the invention will be employed without a correspondinguse of other features without departing from the scope and spirit of theinvention as set forth. Therefore, many modifications may be made toadapt a particular situation or material to the essential scope andspirit of the invention.

Reference throughout this specification to “one embodiment”, “anembodiment”, or “a specific embodiment” or similar terminology meansthat a particular feature, structure, or characteristic described inconnection with the embodiment is included in at least one embodimentand may not necessarily be present in all embodiments. Thus, respectiveappearances of the phrases “in one embodiment”, “in an embodiment”, or“in a specific embodiment” or similar terminology in various placesthroughout this specification are not necessarily referring to the sameembodiment. Furthermore, the particular features, structures, orcharacteristics of any particular embodiment may be combined in anysuitable manner with one or more other embodiments. It is to beunderstood that other variations and modifications of the embodimentsdescribed and illustrated herein are possible in light of the teachingsherein and are to be considered as part of the spirit and scope of theinvention.

In the description herein, numerous specific details are provided, suchas examples of components and/or methods, to provide a thoroughunderstanding of embodiments of the invention. One skilled in therelevant art will recognize, however, that an embodiment may be able tobe practiced without one or more of the specific details, or with otherapparatus, systems, assemblies, methods, components, materials, parts,and/or the like. In other instances, well-known structures, components,systems, materials, or operations are not specifically shown ordescribed in detail to avoid obscuring aspects of embodiments of theinvention. While the invention may be illustrated by using a particularembodiment, this is not and does not limit the invention to anyparticular embodiment and a person of ordinary skill in the art willrecognize that additional embodiments are readily understandable and area part of this invention.

Embodiments discussed herein can be implemented in a set of distributedcomputers communicatively coupled to a network (for example, theInternet). Any suitable programming language can be used to implementthe routines, methods or programs of embodiments of the inventiondescribed herein, including R, Python, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, HTML,or any other programming or scripting code, etc. Othersoftware/hardware/network architectures may be used. Communicationsbetween computers implementing embodiments can be accomplished using anyelectronic, optical, radio frequency signals, or other suitable methodsand tools of communication in compliance with known network protocols.

Although the steps, operations, or computations may be presented in aspecific order, this order may be changed in different embodiments. Insome embodiments, to the extent multiple steps are shown as sequentialin this specification, some combination of such steps in alternativeembodiments may be performed at the same time. The sequence ofoperations described herein can be interrupted, suspended, or otherwisecontrolled by another process, such as an operating system, kernel, etc.The routines can operate in an operating system environment or asstand-alone routines. Functions, routines, methods, steps and operationsdescribed herein can be performed in hardware, software, firmware or anycombination thereof.

Embodiments described herein can be implemented in the form of controllogic in software or hardware or a combination of both. The controllogic may be stored in an information storage medium, such as acomputer-readable medium, as a plurality of instructions adapted todirect an information processing device to perform a set of stepsdisclosed in the various embodiments. Based on the disclosure andteachings provided herein, a person of ordinary skill in the art willappreciate other ways and/or methods to implement the invention.

A “computer-readable medium” may be any medium that can contain, store,communicate, propagate, or transport the program for use by or inconnection with the instruction execution system, apparatus, system ordevice. The computer readable medium can be, by way of example only butnot by limitation, an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic,infrared, or semiconductor system, apparatus, system, device,propagation medium, or computer memory. Such computer-readable mediumshall generally be machine readable and include software programming orcode that can be human readable (e.g., source code) or machine readable(e.g., object code). Examples of non-transitory computer-readable mediacan include random access memories, read-only memories, hard drives,data cartridges, magnetic tapes, floppy diskettes, flash memory drives,optical data storage devices, compact-disc read-only memories, and otherappropriate computer memories and data storage devices.

As used herein, the terms “comprises,” “comprising,” “includes,”“including,” “has,” “having,” or any other variation thereof, areintended to cover a non-exclusive inclusion. For example, a process,product, article, or apparatus that comprises a list of elements is notnecessarily limited only those elements but may include other elementsnot expressly listed or inherent to such process, product, article, orapparatus.

Furthermore, the term “or” as used herein is generally intended to mean“and/or” unless otherwise indicated. For example, a condition A or B issatisfied by any one of the following: A is true (or present) and B isfalse (or not present), A is false (or not present) and B is true (orpresent), and both A and B are true (or present). As used herein, a termpreceded by “a” or “an” (and “the” when antecedent basis is “a” or “an”)includes both singular and plural of such term, unless clearly indicatedwithin the claim otherwise (i.e., that the reference “a” or “an” clearlyindicates only the singular or only the plural). Also, as used in thedescription herein and throughout the meaning of “in” includes “in” and“on” unless the context clearly dictates otherwise.

1-21. (canceled)
 22. An identity management system, comprising: a datastore; a processor; a non-transitory, computer-readable storage medium,including computer instructions for: obtaining identity management datafrom one or more identity management systems in a distributed enterprisecomputing environment, the identity management data comprising data on aset of entitlements and a set of identities, the set of entitlements andset of identities utilized in identity management in the distributedenterprise computing environment; generating a role graph from theidentity management data by: creating a node of the role graph for eachof a set of roles, for each first role and second role that share atleast one entitlement of the set of entitlements or at least oneidentity of the set of identities, creating an edge of the role graphbetween a first node representing the first role and a second node ofthe role graph representing the second role, and generating a weight foreach edge of the role graph between each first node representing thefirst role and second node representing the second role based on the atleast one entitlement or the at least one identity shared between thefirst role represented by the first node and the second role representedby the second node; presenting a metric or the role graph to a userthrough an interface, wherein the metric is an assessment of identitymanagement associated with the distributed enterprise computingenvironment determined based on the role graph.
 23. The system of claim22, wherein the metric is determined based on a deviation between therole graph and a second role graph.
 24. The system of claim 23, whereinthe second role graph represents a theoretically best role structure.25. The system of claim 23, wherein the second role graph is formedbased on removing a role from the set of roles or adding a role to theset of roles, and generating the second role graph based on theresulting set of roles.
 26. The system of claim 22, further comprisingpresenting the user with a recommendation regarding modification of arole structure represented by the role graph.
 27. The system of claim22, wherein the role graph is an access role graph or a concurrency rolegraph.
 28. The system of claim 22, wherein the metric is a qualityassessment metric.
 29. A method, comprising obtaining identitymanagement data from one or more identity management systems in adistributed enterprise computing environment, the identity managementdata comprising data on a set of entitlements and a set of identities,the set of entitlements and set of identities utilized in identitymanagement in the distributed enterprise computing environment;generating a role graph from the identity management data by: creating anode of the role graph for each of a set of roles, for each first roleand second role that share at least one entitlement of the set ofentitlements or at least one identity of the set of identities, creatingan edge of the role graph between a first node representing the firstrole and a second node of the role graph representing the second role,and generating a weight for each edge of the role graph between eachfirst node representing the first role and second node representing thesecond role based on the at least one entitlement or the at least oneidentity shared between the first role represented by the first node andthe second role represented by the second node; presenting a metric orthe role graph to a user through an interface, wherein the metric is anassessment of identity management associated with the distributedenterprise computing environment determined based on the role graph. 30.The method of claim 29, wherein the metric is determined based on adeviation between the role graph and a second role graph.
 31. The methodof claim 30, wherein the second role graph represents a theoreticallybest role structure.
 32. The method of claim 30, wherein the second rolegraph is formed based on removing a role from the set of roles or addinga role to the set of roles, and generating the second role graph basedon the resulting set of roles.
 33. The method of claim 29, furthercomprising presenting the user with a recommendation regardingmodification of a role structure represented by the role graph.
 34. Themethod of claim 29, wherein the role graph is an access role graph or aconcurrency role graph.
 35. The method of claim 29, wherein the metricis a quality assessment metric.
 36. A non-transitory computer readablemedium, comprising computer instructions that, when executed on aprocessor, cause the processor to perform the steps of: obtainingidentity management data from one or more identity management systems ina distributed enterprise computing environment, the identity managementdata comprising data on a set of entitlements and a set of identities,the set of entitlements and set of identities utilized in identitymanagement in the distributed enterprise computing environment;generating a role graph from the identity management data by: creating anode of the role graph for each of a set of roles, for each first roleand second role that share at least one entitlement of the set ofentitlements or at least one identity of the set of identities, creatingan edge of the role graph between a first node representing the firstrole and a second node of the role graph representing the second role,and generating a weight for each edge of the role graph between eachfirst node representing the first role and second node representing thesecond role based on the at least one entitlement or the at least oneidentity shared between the first role represented by the first node andthe second role represented by the second node; presenting a metric orthe role graph to a user through an interface, wherein the metric is anassessment of identity management associated with the distributedenterprise computing environment determined based on the role graph. 37.The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 36, wherein themetric is determined based on a deviation between the role graph and asecond role graph.
 38. The non-transitory computer readable medium ofclaim 37, wherein the second role graph represents a theoretically bestrole structure.
 39. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim37, wherein the second role graph is formed based on removing a rolefrom the set of roles or adding a role to the set of roles, andgenerating the second role graph based on the resulting set of roles.40. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 36, furthercomprising presenting the user with a recommendation regardingmodification of a role structure represented by the role graph.
 41. Thenon-transitory computer readable medium of claim 36, wherein the rolegraph is an access role graph or a concurrency role graph.
 42. Thenon-transitory computer readable medium of claim 36, wherein the metricis a quality assessment metric.